Are they asking you to sign a release or any other document as you depart? If so, you could insist on a non-disparagement clause. If they want to wait until after you leave to tell everyone, that's their business, but if they mislead people as to the circumstances of your departure, that potentially injures you.
It seems like a focus on the internal human biome could be a Kuhnian paradigm shift -- but like everything else about health, it also presents ripe opportunities for quackery. Let's see some more real research on this before anyone starts trying to self-infect.
I believe there was an article about how one research study was wrong about the percentage of human mass being bacteria (I think the claim was 50% of our mass is bacteria). So, I expect Mercola and company to latch onto this craze soon enough if they haven't already.
Gah - that is a bad conclusion to draw from that study. There are some 39 trillion bacterial cells in a human body, and ~30 trillion 'human' cells in our body. EXCEPT that 25 of the 30 trillion human cells in our body don't even have any human DNA in them (red blood cells lack a nucleus, cannot divide, and do not contain human genetic information).
It's hard to count human cells, and non-human cells. Counting mass, nuclei, activity, etc. are all different.
The original hypothesis still stands - a truly significant portion of you is not human.
I've never heard it stated in terms of mass, I've always heard it in terms of a human body having many more bacterial than human cells. But that is being revisited (probably the research you mention):
And prokaryotic cells are much, much smaller than eurkaryotic cells. I think the mass of a eukaryotic cell is over 1000x the mass of a prokaryotic cell.
