Further to the earlier blog on gut flora, this just in from my bro and sis-in-law who happily fulfilled my mother's wish to have medico-scientist types in our family.
In the womb the gastrointestinal tract is sterile. So the baby is born without any gut microflora. This is why they are given a vitamin K shot at birth: your gut microflora provide the body with vitamin K. With all tracts in the body with one or more openings to the external environment (the GIT, the respiratory tract and the genitourinary tract(s)) the regions closest to the openings have a rich microflora. (The inner regions e.g. the stomach and small intestine; the lungs; the bladder and the kidneys) are sterile (blood is also sterile). So once the baby is born the openings of his or her tracts (mouth, anus, external urethral orifice, vagina) are accessible to environmental organisms. It may also be the case that given the proximity of the anus to the vagina in a woman, the baby may acquire some of their microflora during the passage through the birth canal.
In some herbivores, gut microbes are important aids in digestion. So that in some cases the babies perform coprophagy: that is they will eat their parents faeces.
BTW: a significant part of your faeces is comprised of expelled gut bacteria.
This whole thing just gets ickier, don't it!. But, it's clear that since we humans seem to have given up eating our own shit - well, except for the intentional and unintentionl coprophagists among us - it looks like there's a place of a little bit of 'dirt' in our lives, at least our early ones, and from the research being done, in our later ones as well.
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