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Comment by Me000 | Hacker News Reader

How would this effect gut bacteria?

Gut bacteria will be happy, because their host didn't die from sepsis.

You are technically correct (the best kind of correct), but I guess parent was asking whether this has any anti-bacterial side effects that might affect the gut flora. I'm wondering about this as well. The drug in question isn't an anti-biotic per-se, it doesn't help fight sepsis by making your body even more indiscriminately angry at bacteria - quite the opposite. Based on that, my suspicion is that the gut flora would not be affected directly, and would be happy on the basis of the host itself surviving the sepsis.

There has, apparently, been some research on this, but (IANADoctor) it doesn't look conclusive.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6330042/ did mouse trials of fluoxetine and then checked the gut microbiome; they did find some changes in groups known to correlate with regulation of body mass. But, this is (a) mouse models and (b) a long string of correlations with (to my knowledge) no actual causal understanding.

Here's a primer on the brain - gut connection. It's well established, but maybe not well understood.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...

gut bacteria operate under the assumption that even if there host dies, in very many cases the host will be the victim of a preditor or a scavenger, and just hitches a ride up or down.the food chain, perfectly happy taking 100 bilion to to 1 odds on making it to the next perfect host bah!, its not even the sort of thing even worth thinking about going into suspended animaton for edit: on further consideration ,the situation is actauly reversed, our flora do survive us, but we will die without them, and they have other, rather gross means of survival, by ...raising the dead, literaly in the case of corpses in.the water, due to there continued activity, bloating a dead body wherapon they escape useing a balisic method, on decompression.

The mutualism of microorganisms and humans is a fascinating and relatively new sphere of research. One such space is the family of antibacterial (and antiviral) viruses that have apparently evolved into a mutualistic relationship with humans: their development and proclivity is tied to their hosts (they spread by direct placental diffusion from mother-to-fetus, or by milk, they're too fragile to survive in the external environment, and since humans eating humans is rare they don't have other avenues) and so they actually have features that attack harmful bacteria, attack and disrupt harmful viruses, or generate immune-system antagonistic chemical signals to attract our defenses to incoming infections.

They flew under the radar all this time because they're viruses; in general, the only viruses we're aware of in humans are the ones that cause harmful symptoms because actually visualizing the little bastards requires busting out the ol' electron microscope, so if they don't give us a reason to look we aren't looking!

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