A man frozen for 5,300 years had your stomach bug

A man frozen for 5,300 years had the same stomach bug your doctor tests for

Two hikers found him in the ice of the Alps in 1991. He had been lying there 5,300 years. We call him Ötzi the Iceman.

His skin survived. So did the tattoos and the arrow wound in his shoulder. Then researchers found something nobody expected… the DNA of a stomach bug, still readable after five thousand years.

They sequenced all of it. The bug was Helicobacter pylori — the ulcer bug your own doctor still tests for.

And it is no museum piece. Billions of us carry it today.

So why do so few of us know it is in there?

The Iceman's gut lining still carried the marks of an angry infection

His stomach took 18 years to find. It had drifted up under his lungs, so early teams looked in the wrong spot. Frank Maixner and Albert Zink caught it on CT scans in 2009.

Their work went into Science in January 2016. The strain was an ancestral Asian type, carrying the same genes that drive ulcers and stomach cancer now. His lining held neutrophil proteins too — the fingerprint of an active infection.

Zink's read: that infection was probably a bad one. So how does a bug live in acid that dissolves nails?

It switches your acid off in the small patch where it sits

Your stomach runs at a pH near 2. Bacteria die in seconds down there. But this one has whip-like tails, and it corkscrews out of the acid into the slick coat on your stomach wall.

Then it cheats. The bug makes an enzyme called urease, which turns urea into ammonia. Ammonia cancels acid. So it builds a calm little bubble around itself and settles in for decades.

Your immune cells keep charging. They cannot reach through that coat. A slow fire that never dies wears a raw spot into your stomach wall. And the odd part is when this bug arrived.

You likely caught it before your tenth birthday

H. pylori moves through families. Shared spoons, kisses, a tasted spoon of baby food, dirty water. Nearly everyone who has it picked it up as a small child, then carried it for life without a peep.

About one carrier in ten ends up with an ulcer. The tell is a dull burn above the navel that bites hardest on an empty stomach.

It is also the one bacterium on the World Health Organization's list of proven cancer causes. Class 1, like tobacco smoke.

Few gut problems come with an off switch this clean. And one green thing holds the bug down meanwhile.

Broccoli sprouts cut the bug's numbers by more than 40%

Jed Fahey, a biochemist at Johns Hopkins, ran the trial in Japan on 50 infected adults. Twenty-five ate 70 grams of broccoli sprouts a day. The rest ate alfalfa sprouts. Eight weeks, in Cancer Prevention Research, 2009.

In the broccoli group the stool marker for the bug fell by over 40%, and signs of stomach inflammation eased with it. Nothing moved in the alfalfa group. The compound at work is sulforaphane.

One honest limit: eight weeks after the sprouts stopped, the marker crept back. Call this a leash, not a cure.

And a leash is not the point when twenty minutes can settle it.

Ask your doctor for the urea breath test

You drink a small solution and breathe into a bag. If the bug is there, its urease splits the drink apart and puts a marked gas in your breath. Twenty minutes, nothing down your throat.

A positive result means about two weeks of treatment, and the large majority clear it for good. Antacids do something else. They mute the burn while the bug digs.

One bag of breath beats another decade of guessing.