A medical campaign that helped eliminate river blindness in remote Amazonian villages also did something researchers didn’t expect: it began reshaping the gut microbiome of Indigenous communities within just four months—before diet, housing, or lifestyle had changed at all.
The findings, published in Cell Reports, followed 335 Indigenous people living in Venezuelan Amazonian villages with varying levels of outside contact. Researchers found that the microbes of these people began shifting within just a few months of repeated medical visits, moving toward patterns more commonly seen in industrialized populations.
