If we are rich, the best restaurants are open to us, we pay for first-class lounges so that we don't have to sit in the crowded waiting rooms at the airport, and we are invited to sit on the boards of important Jewish communal organizations. From messages in the media to the salary structures of our corporations, everything in our society communicates the notion that our worth is dependent on the size of our paychecks. On the other hand, in these days of multimillionaires, it is also easy to feel inferior to a person who possesses enormous riches. In our affluent culture, it is so easy for us to compare the sizes of our houses or the makes of our cars and to feel superior to those we trump.
Skin deep org skin#
So why is our Torah reading restricted to skin diseases alone?Ī modern commentator suggests that the Torah is talking about skin-deep disease, warning us against the sin of superficiality. And many of these diseases manifest themselves in ugly, unpleasant ways. After all, every organ and system in our body is susceptible to disease or injury.
But when we think about tzaraat, the focus is strangely narrow. The study appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research funded the project.Parashat Tazria/M'tzora is concerned with skin diseases and the procedures involved in checking for them, assessing them, declaring the sufferers healed, and reintegrating the latter into the community.
Scott Weese, a professor at Guelph, plans to further examine whether co-evolution has taken place between skin microbial communities and their hosts, which is one mechanism that may account for their observations of phylosymbiosis. "It's exciting that we can still see this signal despite the contribution of habitat to the skin microbial community." "We were able to measure phylosymbiosis between some of the mammalian classes and the corresponding communities on their skin," said Kirsten Müller, a biology professor at Waterloo and co-author of this study. Habitat was another important factor linked to the skin microbes on mammals that were sampled for this study.ĭespite these important influences on mammalian skin microbial communities, the study found evidence that microbial communities on mammalian skin may have changed over time with their hosts, a phenomenon called phylosymbiosis. Living in homes, bathing and wearing clothing may all have contributed to the unique makeup of microbial communities on human skin. "Our skin is the largest organ of the body and the main barrier to the external environment." "The first line that gets hit by modern hygienic practices is our skin," said Ashley Ross, a co-author of the study and a graduate student at Waterloo at the time of the research. "We were quite surprised when we saw just how distinct we humans are from almost all other mammals, at least in terms of the skin microbes that we can collect with a swab," said Josh Neufeld, a professor of biology at the University of Waterloo and senior author of the study.Ī team made up of researchers from the University of Waterloo and the University of Guelph conducted the most comprehensive survey of mammals to date and found that human microbiome-the collection of microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses that naturally occur on our skin-contains significantly less diversity than that of other mammals.