It has been estimated that there are over 380 trillion viruses inhabiting us, a community collectively known as the human virome. But these viruses are not the dangerous ones you commonly hear about, like those that cause the flu or the common cold, or more sinister infections like Ebola or dengue. Many of these viruses infect the bacteria that live inside you and are known as bacteriophages, or phages for short. The human body is a breeding ground for phages, and despite their abundance, we have very little insight into what all they or any of the other viruses in the body are doing.
Viruses may inhabit all surfaces both inside and outside of the body. Everywhere researchers have looked in the human body, viruses have been found. Viruses in the blood? Check. Viruses on the skin? Check. Viruses in the lungs? Check…
Viruses are contagious. But we often don’t think about bacterial viruses as being easily shared. Researchers have shown that just living with someone will lead to rapid sharing of the viruses in your body. If we don’t know what the consequences are of the constant battle between bacteria and viruses in our body, then it gets exponentially more complicated considering the battle between your bacteria and their viruses that are then shared with everyone including your spouse, your roommate, and even your dog.
It may seem counterintuitive, but harming our bacteria can be harmful to our health. For example, when our healthy bacterial communities are disturbed by antibiotic use, other microbial bad guys, also called pathogens, take advantage of the opportunity to invade our body and make us sick. Thus, in a number of human conditions, our healthy bacteria play important roles in preventing pathogen intrusion. Here’s where viruses come in. They’ve already figured out how to kill bacteria. It’s all they live for.
The study of the human virome lags so far behind the study of bacteria that we are only just now uncovering some of their most basic features. This lag is due to it having taken scientists much longer to recognize the presence of a human virome, and a lack of standardized and sophisticated tools to decipher what’s actually in your virome.
Read the full article: http://earthsky.org/human-world/trillions-of-viruses-human-virome?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=03307ebccf-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-03307ebccf-394522281
Chez Froggie 