As a microbiologist, I’m all too aware that we’re surrounded by airborne microbes. Whenever I work with in the lab, I have to rigorously apply what’s known as “sterile technique,” a set of standards and practices designed to minimize environmental contamination. Even when practicing sterile technique, I find my media, reagents, and tools become contaminated all too often. Given this issue, I often wonder how many microbes are floating around the lab and whether or not they’re dangerous. Today, I’m going to delve deeply into this topic by analyzing sources of airborne microbes and determining the overall effect they might have on humans.
Where do airborne microbes come from?
Microbes can originate from a variety of sources. The most common are described below:
Humans: As my previous posts have shown, humans have a robust microbiome (1). Almost every organ, orifice, and surface in our bodies contain microbes. Since we’re constantly moving, respiring, excreting, and shedding, we have ample opportunity to eject our microbiome into the air.
Animals: Pets and other animals can add microbes to the air for the same reasons that humans do.
Plants: Even though plants are stationary, they undergo many processes that can release the microbes that live within them. Pollen and seeds are designed to move around, and environmental factors like wind, rain, and foraging animals can contribute to release of the microbes within them into the air.
Fungi: Although most microbes are bacteria, many fungi are capable of releasing spores into the air.
Decay/Garbage: Garbage and other wastes may not always be a significant source of microbes, but it often contains food and other sources of energy that can become contaminated with microbes. This leads to concentrated microbial colonies that can continuously release microbes into the air (2).
Dust: Since most dust comes from the sources above, it is not necessarily an original source of airborne microbes. However, dust is important because it can easily be resuspended in air thus giving microbes a second opportunity to become airborne.
Plumbing: Although Indoor plumbing is largely designed to facilitate the removal of sources of airborne bacteria, it’s not a perfect system. Contaminated water can release airborne microbes when sprayed and simple actions like flushing a toilet can release fecal bacteria into the air.
Ventilation: Ventilation contributes to airborne microbes simply because it is designed to move air around. In addition, microbes can grow within improperly cleaned ventilation systems.
Mold: Water damaged houses and other waterlogged materials can be the perfect incubators for fungi. Although these fungi are centrally located on the damp material, their presence has been shown to dramatically increase local airborne fungi levels.
It’s important to note that these aren’t the only potential sources of airborne microbes. For example, a house near a body of water might see high levels of aquatic bacteria in the air (4). However, I wanted to focus on sources that are present in most environments.
What effect do these microbes have on our health?
Determining whether or not these microbes are bad for us is a difficult question. The vast majority of airborne bacteria are harmless, but most studies detect a few pathogens at least. One particularly robust study published in 2015 looked at microbes in dust across the United States of American (4) They detected a variety of strains, many that were localized to different parts of the country.
The figure above shows the relative abundance of the microbe genera Cellulomonas, Terriglobus, Alternaria, and Cladosporium across the United States (4). From all of these samples, the only prevalent pathogen was Cladosporium, a fungi that kills plants a causes asthma, but this genus was one a small portion of the total microbes they detected.
Nevertheless, certain sources of airborne microbes can contain a high number of dangerous pathogens. The simplest example is a sick person. Anyone infected with a disease that can spread by air will eject pathogens by coughing, sneezing, or just being in the area. For this reason, hospitals and other areas were the ill might be congregated have high risks of containing dangerous levels of pathogens (5) Humans aren’t the only source of dangerous microbes either. Waste sites are often tested for hazardous microbes and several studies have found alarming results. One paper showed that bacteria with antimicrobial resistance genes were prevalent at dump sites in India (6) and another has discovered an abundance of Salmonella and other potentially dangerous microbes in the air at wastewater treatment plants (7). Improperly cleaned ventilation systems have caused major outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease, and mold can often release toxic chemicals (3)
Its important to note that airborne microbes can be beneficial as well. In most cases, this relates to acquired immunity. Many studies have found that exposure to farms reduces asthma, possibly because airborn microbes from animal microbiomes stimulates the development of human immune systems (8, 9, 10). To test this possibility, scientists have exposed mice to farm-derived airborne microbes and tested their immune response to common allergens.
Mouse models showing that airborne bacteria from farms reduce the effect of common allergens. Table adapted from (9)
The table above shows a reduced immune response upon exposure to the farm-derived agents. In other words, these mice were much more resistant to allergens of the bronchia and lung when exposed to airborne bacteria from a farm at a young age or during development. This helps confirm that airborne bacteria may be responsible for the observed allergy resistance in children on farms.
What should we do about airborne microbes?
Since airborne bacteria can be harmful, helpful, or have no effect on human health, it may be difficult to know whether we should reduce or increase exposure to them. In cases like this, I’d recommend the common sense approach. Get rid of rotting wastes, clean your house’s ventilation system every so often and don’t go around hugging sick people, but feel free to pet animals or have consensual sex.
While I was writing this post, I began to wonder just how many microorganisms are in the air we breathe. As I investigated this question, I realized that I delved into a topic worthy of an entirely separate post. Thus, my next article will be a sister post to answer this very question and show how scientists came to their conclusions.
Images
All images used have been labelled for re-use on Google Images or are taken directly from the publication. If any image owner has an issue with this article, please contact me and I will address the issue.
Images not referenced within the text come from the following sources (in order):
Face Masks: https://udn.com/news/story/3/2294594
Sneeze: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgical_mask
References
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiota
(2) http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es0223426
(3) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688924/
(4) http://www.pnas.org/content/112/18/5756.full
(5) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1420326X03012001002
(6) http://www.isca.in/IJENS/Archive/v3/i10/7.ISCA-IRJEvS-2014-166.pdf
(7) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0043135409001602
(8) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18572111
(9) https://www.nature.com/articles/nri2871
(10) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2222.2000.00799.x/full
About the Author
I’m a research scientist living in the suburbs of Boston. I recently left academia to work in in industry, but I miss teaching so I decided to start writing articles on interesting discoveries in the world of microbiology. My goal is to uncover subjects that are unusual, unique, and might one day have a major impact on our daily lives.
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Very Informative!!! Thanks for writing such piece of content!!! I have also write down about air pollution and importance of indoor plants. Take a look https://steemit.com/health/@purankaushal/tiny-indoor-plants-are-superior-to-any-other-big-household
Great post. I also have a scientific background and even though I'm not a microbiologist I'm pretty much aware of airborne microbes, although it was still a great read that has provided me with a lot of useful information. We have to be careful all the time - and I try to be, especially when I travel to various countries - those, that are of entirely different climate - this is when things like that tend to be extra dangerous.
Glad to see more people with a science background on Steem. Consider joining SteemSTEM!
I'm wanting to go to college and study Physical Anthropology. Though I was aware of the human biome, something I had failed to consider was that plants had their own biomes as well. This post was very informative. Thanks for posting it!
Glad to be giving some useful info. Thanks for the comment!
scientists developing time-travel will have to deal with airborne microbes too.
because of genetic mutation,
if you travel back in time somehow, you'll kill all the humans on the face of the earth except yourself, because they will not have resistance to the newly introduced micro-organisms.
and if you travel in future every micro-organism would probably kill you, as they would have advanced genetic mutation from which you'll have no resistance to.
we'll be pretty much screwed if we time-travel without the isolated suite, maybe a flamethrower too.
nice post btw
Wubba Luba Dub Dub!!!!
Thanks. I suppose its possible that if you go to the future, you'll kill everyone else with some long extinct microbe that no one has encountered before, I agree that you'd probably get sick too.
Wow very nicely done and quite informative article here. I really think this an important public health topic where more discussion needs to occur. Environmental hazards can be extremely detrimental, especially over long periods of time, as this could manifest into a chronic respiratory illness or something of similar relation. Great post, very interesting and well written. I am definitely going to give @steemstem a go and @tking77798 a follow and upvote for this one. Keep up the good work!!
Hey @conradsuperb, glad you liked the article. Hopefully I'll get some more posts up soon!
Ahhh, that's a nice mouse study that you cited, confirming what physicians have suspected!
Now, that you mentioned the USA, I remember learning about various really nasty and scary fungus pathogens that are endemic to the Americas, such as Coccidioides immitis and Histoplasma capsulatum. I'm happy that we don't have them floating around in Europe :-D.
Maybe you can cover them in a post? They cause lots of lung infections and I feel like too few people know about them.
Thanks for the suggestion and glad to get some constructive comments. I'll look into those pathogens and see if I find anything worthy of a post.
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STOPstay clear of the dangerous ones.
Yeah, unfortunately that can be difficult.
I m new steem user i like your post plz gaid me more steem boster
Hey @tking77798, thanks for sharing this with us. I've never thought about it before and your title captured my attention. The article rises attention to a topic which is common to all our lives, but most of us don't bother to think about it. Now I will. Keep it up ! :)
Glad you liked it!
Responsibilities
Tasks vary depending on your area of specialism. For example, healthcare scientists working in microbiology will be involved in preventing, diagnosing and controlling the spread of infections, whereas those working in manufacturing may be involved in quality control, checking for signs of contamination.
Depending on your areas of expertise, you'll typically need to:
monitor and identify microorganisms
track microorganisms in a range of environments
monitor and assess samples from a range of sources
follow regular sampling schedules within a specific environment
use a variety of identification methods, including molecular techniques, to test samples
develop new techniques, products and processes
develop and plan methods to prevent the spread of disease
develop and register new medicines, vaccines, diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical products
plan, implement and evaluate new products in clinical trials
collect samples from different types of environments, such as agricultural sites
develop products such as enzymes, vitamins, hormones and antimicrobials
grow microbial cultures, e.g. for use in the food and drink industry or in agriculture
work with specialist computer software to undertake studies and research
manage and oversee laboratory work.
I suppose all that is true though that's a bit removed from the topic of the post.
Thanks for sharing this post abut science.I love Science very much.
Wow this is such a thorough post! Great job.
thanks your sharing
very essential information. keep it up and thanks.
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nice article
😍A very informative post. Great job. Keep it up! 😍
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