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Earth Beat - Foreign Bodies

On air: 23 March 2012 3:00 (Photo: Scott Wallace)

Earth Beat, 23 March 2012. Things that turn up in the unlikeliest of places. Like sea salt full of prescription drugs, or pesticides in the Arctic. And the man searching the Amazon for a tribe he’s not allowed to contact. Foreign bodies, in all their forms.

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Jasper Lawrence

Jasper Lawrence

A can of worms - listen in new player

That’s how the expression goes, but Jasper Lawrence actually has 75 hookworms in his gut. Jasper grew up suffering from allergies and asthma. In the end his medication was so strong that he was severely overweight, constantly breathless and had pretty much given hope of being healthy ever again.

Until he learnt what the hookworm could do for him. He set off for Cameroon in West Central Africa to deliberately infect himself with the parasite by walking on human excrement. We ask him if it was worth it, if he's better now and at what cost? View photos.

Visit Jasper's website - Autoimmune Therapies. Jasper also blogs here.

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Scott Wallace

Scott Wallace

The Unconquered - listen in new player

Regular Earth Beat listeners might remember a story we covered last year, about a group of men employed by the Brazilian government to find and make contact with the lone survivor of the massacre of a tribe in the Amazon, so that he could be left alone. It was the kind of story that divided people: should contact have been made or not?

Scott Wallace is a photojournalist and author of The Unconquered, a book about a unique expedition to the Amazon rainforest. Led by Brazilian anthropologist Sydney Possuelo, the mission was to find one of the planet’s last uncontacted tribes – the Flecheiros or Arrow People – without making contact. View photos.

He talks to host Marnie Chesterton about the mission to find, yet avoid.

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Prescription drug with a pinch of salt - listen in new player

Feeling down? Paying too much for birth control pills?

There’s now a single substance that can cure all your ailments – and it goes by the chemical name of Sodium chloride. View photos.

Artist Jon Cohrs and water expert Morgan Levy tell Marnie about Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt.

It's a wonder cure made from all the pharmaceuticals that end up in our waste water.