I was always taught that I couldn’t be too clean. It was good to wash my skin and sanitize my environment. Antibiotics were great when I got sick because they killed the germs that were making me ill. Like many of the other things I was told when I was young—it just ain’t so. At least that's not the whole story.
I always thought of myself as a single organism—a human being. It turns out that I’ve got so many helpful little critters in and on my body that I’m an entire ecosystem. It’s not just tiny animals that live in the cracks and crevices—and inside each of my cells—I’ve got fungi and protozoa. The amazing thing is that if I killed them all off, I probably couldn’t live without them.
These little beings that inhabit the same 185 pound space that I do, make vitamins for me, help me digest my food, create energy, help regulate my immune system, and fight off other bacteria that might want to move in with their wife and kids.
I’m starting to like these little guys.
Being an ecosystem, I have to have balance. If I have too much of one bug—even a good one--it might start eating too many of the others. If I take an antibiotic, a bunch of the good bacteria might die off and leave their homes vacant for bad bacteria to invade our little ecosystem.
In the October 29 edition of Newsweek, Jerry Adler and Jeneen Interlandi write that thousands of species inhabit each of us and the combination of species may be unique in each human being. Scientists are scrambling to identify the species that share our bodies and to look for patterns among different populations of humans so that we can understand this mutually beneficial relationship.
As bacteria become more and more resistant to modern medications, pharmaceutical companies are struggling to produce new antibiotics faster than the bacteria can mutate to resist them. In the news recently is a strain referred to as MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, also known as strain USA300). This strain, which is very difficult and expensive to treat, is also so widespread that a study of 350 children at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, found that 21 percent of the children were carrying the MRSA bacteria but without symptoms.
According to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 19,000 people died of MRSA in 2005. If 21% of the population (and we don’t know the real percentage) carries the MRSA bacteria, why aren’t 50 million people dying each year instead of just 19,000. Part of the answer may be that the friendly bacteria are keeping it under control.
The Newsweek article points out that while we don’t want to thoroughly wash, cleanse, or otherwise destroy every bacteria in our body, neither do we want to ignore good hygiene. If scientists can learn enough about the interactions between humans and the tiny beings that make up each human’s ecosystem, then we may be better able to control the populations of these other beings to our advantage.
Resources:
Adler J., Interlandi J., “Caution: Killing Germs May Be Hazardous To Your Health,” Newsweek,
