Stinky Diapers Reveal Unknown Viruses

The smell of stinky diapers is out of this world and not in a good way, but did you know there’s a whole world living in your baby’s diaper? Scientists in Denmark recently examined hundreds of dirty diapers from babies and found thousands of viruses, which were previously unknown.

While the importance of young children's gut microbes in preventing chronic diseases later in life has long been recognized, little is known about the numerous viruses present.

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A World of Previously Unknown Viruses in a Baby’s Gut

A recent published in the journal Nature Microbiology can confirm that the baby's gut contains about 10,000 viral species, which is 10 times more than the number of bacterial species in a child.

These new-found viruses can be grouped into a total of 248 viral families. Out of which 232 were not previously known until now.

“This means that, from early on in life, healthy children are tumbling about with an extreme diversity of gut viruses, which probably have a major impact on whether they develop various diseases later on in life,” said Professor Dennis Sandris Nielsen of the Department of Food Science at the university.

To understand the early days of gut development, a multidisciplinary team of researchers analyzed the fecal makeup of 647 healthy 1-year-olds who had been enrolled in long-term asthma and chronic inflammatory disease study based in Denmark.

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The Diversity of Viruses Living in your Baby’s Poop

A whopping 90% of the viruses detected among the diaper contents were bacteriophages, which are viruses that attack potentially harmful bacteria. Scientists call these viruses ‘allies’ because they don’t cause illness or disease.

The remaining 10% are eukaryotic, which means they attach themselves to human cells for better or worse. Nielsen explained that this would mean the average child is infected with 10 to 20 of these viruses at any given moment, “which apparently doesn’t make them sick.”

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Bacterial Viruses Could Act as Allies for your Baby

“We just know very little about what’s really at play,” Nielsen continued. “My guess is that they’re important for training our immune system to recognize infections later. But it may also be that they are a risk factor for diseases that we have yet to discover.”

The researchers think viral loads are higher in the infant’s gut because the immune system is still maturing, and needs a militia of bacteriophages as a backup defense, said Shiraz Shah, the study’s first author and a senior researcher at Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood.

“Our hypothesis is that, because the immune system has not yet learned to separate the wheat from the chaff at the age of one, an extraordinarily high species richness of gut viruses emerges and is likely needed to protect against chronic diseases like asthma and diabetes later on in life,” Shah elaborated.

Nielsen noted the environment also plays a part in the plethora of viruses.

“Our gut is sterile until we are born. During birth, we are exposed to bacteria from the mother and environment,” he explained. “It is likely that some of the first viruses come along with these initial bacteria, while many others are introduced later via dirty fingers, pets, dirt that kids put in their mouths, and other things in the environment.”

“A lot of research suggests that the majority of chronic diseases that we're familiar with - from arthritis to depression - have an inflammatory component. That is, the immune system is not working as it ought to - which might be because it wasn't trained properly. So, if we learn more about the role that bacteria and viruses play in a well-trained immune system, it can hopefully lead us to being able to avoid many of the chronic diseases that afflict so many people today,” Shah said.

Reference:

1. Expanding known viral diversity in the healthy infant gut - (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01345-7)

Source-Medindia