The count of bacteria on our planet vastly outnumbers all other life forms combined. One scientific source pegs them around five million trillion trillion strong.
Placed end to end, earth's bacteria would stretch from here to the edge of the visible universe, about ten billion light years away.
You will find bacteria virtually everywhere you look. That includes in your body. You likely know bacteria as invaders, causers of disease. Pharmaceutical companies and television advertising promote that understanding. It's only partly true.
We couldn't live without bacteria--the good kind. Our bodies are really symbionts, part human cells and part bacteria. Our body cells provide the living environment and nutrition for the good bacteria, while they provide protection from many diseases for us.
Those television commercials where graphics show bacteria in the mouth, with actors in white coats making grimacing faces to show how ugly and dangerous the bacteria are deceive us. The mouth is the first line of defence against disease. Good bacteria in the mouth hunt down and kill the bad bacteria before they get any further and acquire a foothold. Those antibacterial mouthwashes kill bad bacteria, as advertised. They also kill far more good and beneficial bacteria whose primary function is to kill the bad ones. Good bacteria in the mouth always vastly outnumber the bad ones, except when both are killed off by antibacterial mouthwashes.
Most cases of bad breath--halitosis--result from dead bacteria and partly broken down food particles on the back of the tongue. Just as you blow your nose when you have a cold to remove the detritus of the battles in your body of good bacteria against bad, you should brush your tongue--especially the back of the tongue that gets little activity--to remove rotting matter.
Mints, gum and eating food either mask problems on the back of the tongue or delay their giving off a bad odour until the mouth is quiet during the night. Morning breath is usually caused by food and dead bacteria rotting away on the back of the tongue during the night. Brush the tongue before bed at night and your breath will likely be much fresher in the morning.
Removing bacteria in the mouth that have given their lives to save yours is like taking out the trash. What the trash was originally was good and beneficial, but there comes a time to get rid of what is no longer useful before it causes other problems. Do that with a brush or scraper, not with an antibacterial mouthwash weapon of mass destruction.
I used to get horrified reactions from readers when I wrote that there are likely more bacteria in our bodies than native cells. Recent estimates based on lab research suggest that bacteria in our bodies outnumber our body's cells by a factor of ten.
Bacteria are the oldest known life form. They have been on earth for 3.5 billion years, since shortly after the surface of our planet solidified.
They were the source of mystery, speculation and superstition until 1674 when Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invented the first microscope and spotted the first "animacules." Some were microbes (including bacteria), some spermatozoa and some blood corpuscles.
Some varieties of bacteria are remarkably adept at reproduction. They can go from birth to being capable of reproduction themselves in ten minutes. A single bacterium could theoretically be the progenitor of more than one billion offspring within five hours. They don't reproduce sexually, so they don't require recovery time. They don't seem to require sleep or rest. They're just full time busy bodies.
There may be more varieties of bacteria as yet unidentified than we have listed of all other known species of life. In 2003, geneticist J. Craig Ventner travelled several oceans of the world scooping up water samples from the surfaces. On examination of his water samples he found more than one million bacterial genes never seen before.
Ventner is leading a team that plans to build a bacterium from scratch. His first created "life form" is under study now.
Why do we need to create more bacteria when we have so many we haven't even found? Remember how some bacteria live so well in our bodies, killing the bad guys that invade us? Some new bacteria could be designed to kill cancer cells, for example. Other researchers are genetically modifying viruses for similar purposes. Some day, curing your newly identified cancer or tuberculosis or cholera may require nothing more than getting a needle in the doctor's office.
Bacteria are fast. E. coli, one of the feared kind but also one of the varieties being genetically modified to help us, can travel 25 times it's own length in one second.That would be like a race horse galloping at 135 miles per hour (216 kph).
Bacteria have been with us and in us for so long that some have been incorporated into our bodies. Mitochondria, an organelle with enzymes that power every cell in our bodies, descended from bacteria. Stretches of our own DNA are virtually identical to the DNA of certain bacteria and viruses. Bacteria may be responsible for allowing our bodies to incorporate virus DNA into our own.
Science is totally rethinking the use of antibiotics to cure our problems. At one time given out freely by doctors to address patient problems they couldn't figure out, including viral infections that cannot be addressed by antibiotics, antibiotics are now recognized as having been abused and misused, resulting in the so-called superbug bacteria that no antibiotic can touch.
Clostridium difficile (better known as C. difficile or C. diff), the terror of some modern hospitals, moves in and takes over a body when its natural defences have been destroyed by antibiotics or immune system failure. It causes painful inflammation in the gut, diarrhea and even death.
Bacteria are so good at adapting to avoid the effects of antibiotics--thus gaining the title superbug--that one superbug bacteria known as MRSA killed 19,000 Americans in 2005 alone.
Floating bacteria have the unusual characteristic of being the "germ" around which moisture collects in the air. One theory, as yet unproven, recommends that bacteria be sprayed onto clouds to "seed" them, causing rain in areas of drought. The problem with testing the theory is that many people believe that all bacteria are bad, a belief they learned from deceptive television commercials.
Bacteria are amazingly resilient. They have been found two miles down in a South African gold mine, living off energy given off by radioactive rocks. Deinococcus radiodurans can survive 10,000 times as much radiation as humans, making it a prime subject for study about cleaning up nuclear waste. Other varieties have been found under two kilometres of ice in the Antarctic and revived, having laid under the ice for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Australian scientists have discovered that Ralstonia metallidurans can turn gold dissolved in a liquid into solid gold nuggets.
Bacteria may even one day not just power, but be the computer you use. As single-purposed and diligent as they are, they can follow directions without close supervision. E. coli has already been assembled as part of a computer, to produce a bull's-eye on command.
No word yet on whether the bacteria will run Windows or Linux.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know what kids need while they are growing, not just what they should be taught to get good jobs as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
[Primary source: Discover, December 2008]
Showing posts with label germs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label germs. Show all posts
Friday, January 09, 2009
Friday, August 08, 2008
Why You Are No Longer Just You
Until now you have likely thought of yourself as "me," an individual human of the homo sapiens sapiens variety, a single being trying to make its way in the world. That will change before you reach the end of this article.
What's more, any thought or fear you may have had that you could be cloned will be removed from your list of possibilities forever. (That reminds me, why did the original of Dolly the sheep, the first large animal that was cloned, not receive any of the credit while Dolly took all the credit and glory? The original sheep that was cloned doesn't even warrant a name for us.)
Each of us is not just one organism, the way we usually think of ourselves. We are actually a symbiosis of billions of organisms, only one of which has the DNA pattern we associate with ourselves. Our DNA gives us the cells we think of as "us." Most of the rest are bacteria, good bacteria without which we could not survive. Each has its own DNA that is nothing like our own.
Let's begin with places that other living things we loosely call germs enter our bodies. The mouth is a very important place to begin because it's the location where the first battles against invaders that could harm us are fought. We don't just have saliva in our mouths when we're not eating. Saliva is the vehicle that carries good bacteria that are our first line of defence against disease. Invading viruses or bacteria could enter our bodies through our mouths at any time.
Okay, we know that if their are going to be battles, they must be fought somewhere. The mouth would be as good a place to fight some as any, right? Not so you'd notice judging by commercials we see on television. How about those mouthwash ads that promise to kill almost every living thing in our mouth if we use it a couple of times every day? That means that we would kill off millions of bacteria in our mouth that are prepared to fight to the death to prevent harmful bacteria and viruses from entering our body.
However much or little you know about military engagements, you would likely agree that it doesn't make sense to kill off the first companies of soldiers that go into battle on our behalf. That is exactly what those bacteria-killing mouthwashes do.
What do mouthwashes really do that is beneficial? They try to kill collections of fungi that grow on the top of the tongue at the back of the mouth. These fungi are the main causes of bad breath. That's what you wanted to avoid, right? Yes, but brushing the back of your tongue with your toothbrush just before you finish brushing your teeth and rinsing will do the same thing. The exact same thing. Only the brush will do it better because it can separate those little forests of tongue things and flick away the fungi, whereas the mouthwash may not be that successful.
If you want your first line of defence against disease caused by most kinds of bacteria and viruses to hold fast and keep you healthy, don't kill it off because you believe the commercials. Big corporations are in business to make money off ignorant people, not to help us maintain good health.
The nose is one of the vulnerable places where germs can enter. Lo and behold, the nose also harbours a boatload of good bacteria to fight disease on our behalf, as well as the mouth. When are the defences of the nose most vulnerable? When the nose gets cold, the bacteria that defend it tend to weaken, to lose their power to fight. They don't necessarily die, they just go kind of dormant. They are very subject to cold.
Along come the viruses (about 200 different kinds of them) that cause us to develop a "cold." Have you ever wondered where that word "cold" came from to describe the runny nose, watery eyes and the rest of the discomfort? It came from an event that lowers our defences against cold viruses, getting our nose cold. A cold nose event isn't the only way to get a cold, nor does having your nose get cold guarantee you will get a viral cold. It's just a common way for the attack of the cold viruses to begin in our body while its primary defences are weak.
The other common place where cold viruses enter our body is through the eyes. Viruses ride the fluid in our eyes as it swashes around the eyeball, then eventually makes its way into the back of the eye where they find body cells to invade or blood cells that will carry them farther inside. We don't have many natural defences against invasion through our eyes. But eye fluid is not exactly conducive to growing or transporting live viruses, so having dry eyes is a condition we want to avoid.
Kissing with the tongue, having an open wound and exchanging bodily fluids through sex are other methods by which germs enter our bodies, only in those cases from another person rather than from air, food or liquid. Those practices are not necessarily risky in terms of increasing our vulnerability to disease. In each case we have good bacteria to defend us against invasion by germs and microbes (two words which mean essentially the same thing). We are as apt to get good bacteria from another person as bad bacteria.
While we have bacteria at work in every organ of our bodies, the greatest proliferation of them is in the stomach and gut. Bacteria actually perform the work we call digestion. Without them we could starve to death even if we ate all day long.
Have you ever wondered why some people could eat a mountain of ice cream without gaining an ounce, while another person gains two pounds just from sniffing a cupcake? The one who easily gains weight is "blessed" with a very efficient digestive system, lots of good bacteria that digest as much as possible of the nutrition they eat. The glutton with the beanpole body style has a very inefficient digestive system, not nearly enough good bacteria to help digest the food that passes through. (I know, it ain't fair.)
Some biologists have estimated that we may have more bacteria in our bodies than we have of our own body cells. While that may sound absurd, remember that just a few years ago very few people believed that anything could live in our bodies other than our own cells. And some bad bacteria and viruses that somehow managed to survive and cause diseases.
That brings us--briefly--to good viruses in our bodies. Are there any? Can a virus be good. As odd as that sounds, remember that just a few years ago (or a couple of minutes ago) you believed that all bacteria were bad. DNA experts tell us that strings of gene patterns in some human chromosomes are identical to gene patterns in some viruses. At some point in our past, some humans have accommodated bad virus genes into their own chromosomes. Now we consider them "natural," part of our own line of defence.
Medical science isn't certain if the virus genes within our own chromosomes help to protect us against certain diseases or prevent our immune system from recognizing disease-causing germs because they have genetic material similar to our own. The odds are that both are true, with different people and different diseases. (Doesn't that confuse the issue!)
We are not subject to some kinds of diseases that other large animals are. And we get a few diseases that other mammals don't. The reason likely has something to do with those strings of virus genes within our own. Some of us can get HIV/AIDS, while others of us could never contract the disease. Heart disease, cancer and other diseases have difference between people, even of the same family. The difference may be who has what viral gene sequences within their own DNA. And that may depend on which viruses were accommodated and which rejected within each person's lifetime. It is possible for DNA to change slightly over a lifetime.
As this gene accommodation and rejection of competing genes from viruses is part of human evolution that is going on today, we can't be certain how it works. Our bodies are still works in progress. We occupy a small section along the production line called life.
As for cloning yourself or cloning anyone else, you can now see that a single organism of DNA could be replicated, but no two could ever have the same combinations of bacterial organisms as each other because their symbiosis would be different. As most of our learning is based on excruciatingly small details we each learn as babies and very young children, no two people with the same DNA could ever be the same either, just as no two identical twins have the same personalities.
Even two people that began life with the same DNA might not be identical as adults because of gene accommodations through their respective lifetimes--that is, they may have different susceptibilities to diseases, for example. Medical science may be able to help us to grow new body parts (we can even grow new brain cells), but the subject of whole body cloning must be left to science fiction writers.
If you take nothing else from this article, at least do yourself a favour and don't kill off the good bacteria that are helping you to live a healthy life. Without them, you can't be healthy and eventually you may die from your own misdeeds.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children who know what is healthy for them and what is not, without using the old trial and error method that made so many people so very sick and even caused their deaths. This stuff is not taught in most schools or homes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
What's more, any thought or fear you may have had that you could be cloned will be removed from your list of possibilities forever. (That reminds me, why did the original of Dolly the sheep, the first large animal that was cloned, not receive any of the credit while Dolly took all the credit and glory? The original sheep that was cloned doesn't even warrant a name for us.)
Each of us is not just one organism, the way we usually think of ourselves. We are actually a symbiosis of billions of organisms, only one of which has the DNA pattern we associate with ourselves. Our DNA gives us the cells we think of as "us." Most of the rest are bacteria, good bacteria without which we could not survive. Each has its own DNA that is nothing like our own.
Let's begin with places that other living things we loosely call germs enter our bodies. The mouth is a very important place to begin because it's the location where the first battles against invaders that could harm us are fought. We don't just have saliva in our mouths when we're not eating. Saliva is the vehicle that carries good bacteria that are our first line of defence against disease. Invading viruses or bacteria could enter our bodies through our mouths at any time.
Okay, we know that if their are going to be battles, they must be fought somewhere. The mouth would be as good a place to fight some as any, right? Not so you'd notice judging by commercials we see on television. How about those mouthwash ads that promise to kill almost every living thing in our mouth if we use it a couple of times every day? That means that we would kill off millions of bacteria in our mouth that are prepared to fight to the death to prevent harmful bacteria and viruses from entering our body.
However much or little you know about military engagements, you would likely agree that it doesn't make sense to kill off the first companies of soldiers that go into battle on our behalf. That is exactly what those bacteria-killing mouthwashes do.
What do mouthwashes really do that is beneficial? They try to kill collections of fungi that grow on the top of the tongue at the back of the mouth. These fungi are the main causes of bad breath. That's what you wanted to avoid, right? Yes, but brushing the back of your tongue with your toothbrush just before you finish brushing your teeth and rinsing will do the same thing. The exact same thing. Only the brush will do it better because it can separate those little forests of tongue things and flick away the fungi, whereas the mouthwash may not be that successful.
If you want your first line of defence against disease caused by most kinds of bacteria and viruses to hold fast and keep you healthy, don't kill it off because you believe the commercials. Big corporations are in business to make money off ignorant people, not to help us maintain good health.
The nose is one of the vulnerable places where germs can enter. Lo and behold, the nose also harbours a boatload of good bacteria to fight disease on our behalf, as well as the mouth. When are the defences of the nose most vulnerable? When the nose gets cold, the bacteria that defend it tend to weaken, to lose their power to fight. They don't necessarily die, they just go kind of dormant. They are very subject to cold.
Along come the viruses (about 200 different kinds of them) that cause us to develop a "cold." Have you ever wondered where that word "cold" came from to describe the runny nose, watery eyes and the rest of the discomfort? It came from an event that lowers our defences against cold viruses, getting our nose cold. A cold nose event isn't the only way to get a cold, nor does having your nose get cold guarantee you will get a viral cold. It's just a common way for the attack of the cold viruses to begin in our body while its primary defences are weak.
The other common place where cold viruses enter our body is through the eyes. Viruses ride the fluid in our eyes as it swashes around the eyeball, then eventually makes its way into the back of the eye where they find body cells to invade or blood cells that will carry them farther inside. We don't have many natural defences against invasion through our eyes. But eye fluid is not exactly conducive to growing or transporting live viruses, so having dry eyes is a condition we want to avoid.
Kissing with the tongue, having an open wound and exchanging bodily fluids through sex are other methods by which germs enter our bodies, only in those cases from another person rather than from air, food or liquid. Those practices are not necessarily risky in terms of increasing our vulnerability to disease. In each case we have good bacteria to defend us against invasion by germs and microbes (two words which mean essentially the same thing). We are as apt to get good bacteria from another person as bad bacteria.
While we have bacteria at work in every organ of our bodies, the greatest proliferation of them is in the stomach and gut. Bacteria actually perform the work we call digestion. Without them we could starve to death even if we ate all day long.
Have you ever wondered why some people could eat a mountain of ice cream without gaining an ounce, while another person gains two pounds just from sniffing a cupcake? The one who easily gains weight is "blessed" with a very efficient digestive system, lots of good bacteria that digest as much as possible of the nutrition they eat. The glutton with the beanpole body style has a very inefficient digestive system, not nearly enough good bacteria to help digest the food that passes through. (I know, it ain't fair.)
Some biologists have estimated that we may have more bacteria in our bodies than we have of our own body cells. While that may sound absurd, remember that just a few years ago very few people believed that anything could live in our bodies other than our own cells. And some bad bacteria and viruses that somehow managed to survive and cause diseases.
That brings us--briefly--to good viruses in our bodies. Are there any? Can a virus be good. As odd as that sounds, remember that just a few years ago (or a couple of minutes ago) you believed that all bacteria were bad. DNA experts tell us that strings of gene patterns in some human chromosomes are identical to gene patterns in some viruses. At some point in our past, some humans have accommodated bad virus genes into their own chromosomes. Now we consider them "natural," part of our own line of defence.
Medical science isn't certain if the virus genes within our own chromosomes help to protect us against certain diseases or prevent our immune system from recognizing disease-causing germs because they have genetic material similar to our own. The odds are that both are true, with different people and different diseases. (Doesn't that confuse the issue!)
We are not subject to some kinds of diseases that other large animals are. And we get a few diseases that other mammals don't. The reason likely has something to do with those strings of virus genes within our own. Some of us can get HIV/AIDS, while others of us could never contract the disease. Heart disease, cancer and other diseases have difference between people, even of the same family. The difference may be who has what viral gene sequences within their own DNA. And that may depend on which viruses were accommodated and which rejected within each person's lifetime. It is possible for DNA to change slightly over a lifetime.
As this gene accommodation and rejection of competing genes from viruses is part of human evolution that is going on today, we can't be certain how it works. Our bodies are still works in progress. We occupy a small section along the production line called life.
As for cloning yourself or cloning anyone else, you can now see that a single organism of DNA could be replicated, but no two could ever have the same combinations of bacterial organisms as each other because their symbiosis would be different. As most of our learning is based on excruciatingly small details we each learn as babies and very young children, no two people with the same DNA could ever be the same either, just as no two identical twins have the same personalities.
Even two people that began life with the same DNA might not be identical as adults because of gene accommodations through their respective lifetimes--that is, they may have different susceptibilities to diseases, for example. Medical science may be able to help us to grow new body parts (we can even grow new brain cells), but the subject of whole body cloning must be left to science fiction writers.
If you take nothing else from this article, at least do yourself a favour and don't kill off the good bacteria that are helping you to live a healthy life. Without them, you can't be healthy and eventually you may die from your own misdeeds.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children who know what is healthy for them and what is not, without using the old trial and error method that made so many people so very sick and even caused their deaths. This stuff is not taught in most schools or homes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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