Cancer, depression, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, swelling of the brain, obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cystic fibrosis.
When comparing this list, although relatively short, to the one formed in writing exercise one, I see that there is a huge increase in the number of diseases I was able to list. Of course, this is because much of the conversation in this course was regarding microbes effects on humans, including their effects on non-infectious diseases. Some of the responses did overlap as I had some prior knowledge of microbes effects on the body.
The most important topics I will take away from this course are essentially that microbes can influence almost all human conditions. One of the most interesting to me personally was the effect that they have on human weight, and the microflora of an obese person is vastly different from that of a lean person.
