How a Common Stomach Bug Causes Cancer
At first, doctors didn’t believe that bacteria could live in the stomach at all. Too acidic, they thought. But in 1984, a young Australian physician named Barry Marshall gulped down an infamous concoction of beef broth laced with Helicobacter pylori bacteria. On day eight, he started vomiting. On day 10, an endoscopy revealed that H. pylori had colonized his stomach, their characteristic spiral shape unmistakable under the microscope.
Left untreated, usually establishes infections that persist for an entire lifetime, and : Half of the world’s population harbors inside their stomach, as do more than onecan lead to cancer. This single bacterium is by far the No. 1 risk factor in worldwide. By one estimate, some 70 percent can be attributed to .
