Not all are bad. The vast majority of bacteria in our world are harmless to humans, and many are beneficial. Life on earth would not functi...
Not all are bad. The vast majority of bacteria in our world are harmless to humans, and many are beneficial. Life on earth would not function without bacteria. Bacteria provide many needed nutrients for our survival and the survival of other animals and plants.
Bacteria on our bodies can actually protect us from disease. We are covered with “friendly” bacteria (called our “normal flora”) that tend to take up “space” on our skin and in our gut, making it more difficult for disease-causing bacteria to gain a foothold on us and cause a harmful infection. Our first exposure to such friendly bacteria at birth provides our new immune system with important early exposure to bacteria, so our bodies can learn to control them.
Amazing but true! The average adult person is estimated to contain more bacterial cells than human cells! (The lowest estimate of bacterial cells is higher than the highest estimate of human cells). A rough estimate of the number of different bacterial genes inside us (based on the estimated number of species, and assuming ~2000 genes per species) is more than the highest estimate for the number of human genes in the human genome. We would do well to learn more about the bacteria on and in us that are such a significant part of us!
Harmful bacteria don’t affect all people the same way. For this reason, it’s often hard to tell whether something you did or took helped to make you better or kept you from getting a certain infection. This is why researchers often study large groups of people to determine if, on average, more people are helped by a certain treatment than another group of people given no such treatment.
Bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics, so that the antibiotic becomes unable to control the bug. Antibiotics must therefore be used exactly as prescribed (i.e. take all the pills at the correct dosage and frequency per day – don’t stop taking the medication just because you start to feel better).
Antibiotics can be effective against bacteria, but not viruses. Antibiotics do nothing to help a cold or flu and should only be used when really needed. Not only does such inappropriate use of antibiotics increase the risk of antibiotic resistance forming, but also antibiotics don’t just kill harmful bacteria – they also kill many of the “friendly” bacteria on our body too. Therefore this disruption of the “friendly” bacteria (normal flora) can increase your risk of developing subsequent infections with other microbes that may not have otherwise have been able to infect us.
We have little understanding of our microbial world. We have traditionally been studying primarily those bacteria that we can grow in the laboratory, however it is now becoming apparent that there are many more bacteria on our bodies, and in the environment, that can not grow in traditional laboratory media used to grow microbes. These bacteria remain to be studied by other methods (such as analysis of their DNA sequence).
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