Inhaling agricultural dust may pose significant risks to gut health for workers in animal agriculture, a University of California, Riverside, study has found.
Led by Declan McCole, a professor of biomedical sciences in the UCR School of Medicine, the study expands on prior findings that hog farm dust causes airway inflammation. The researchers now report in the Journal of Applied Toxicology that inhaling this dust also alters the gut microbiome and impairs intestinal function, including increased “leaky gut” or intestinal permeability. Leaky gut is associated with a range of chronic diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, and type 1 diabetes.
“Exposure to swine farm dust, which contains high levels of bacteria and endotoxins, caused both airway inflammation and increased passage of gut bacterial products into the bloodstream in our mouse models,” said Meli’sa Crawford, a former postdoctoral researcher in McCole’s lab and the paper’s first author. “But what’s especially striking is the impact we observed on the gut microbiome and metabolism.”
