CROHN’S disease might be caused by bacteria that have borrowed a few nasty genes from, of all things, plague.
Crohn’s is an incurable inflammation of the intestine that affects 1 in 1000 people in Europe and North America. Researchers suspected gut bacteria were to blame, but could not be sure which, as tests often produced contradictory results. Now Ken Simpson and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have discovered a possible reason for the confusion.
When they studied bacteria from the guts of people with inflamed small intestines, they found no evidence of MAP, a bacterium that some…
