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Antibiotics play hell with gut flora

15 September 2010

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Messing with my flora

(Image: Alain Pol/ISM/SPL)

ANTIBIOTICS can cause long-lasting changes in the bacteria living in the human gut. As changes in gut flora could increase the risk of some chronic diseases, such as inflammatory bowel syndrome, each course of antibiotics may represent a trade-off between short-term benefit and long-term risk.

and of Stanford University in California collected more than 50 stool samples from three people over a 10-month period that included two courses of the antibiotic . They used gene sequencing to identify the microbial strains present in each sample. They found that…

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