Tiny Bugs And Big Bacteria

I have always been fascinated by things you cannot see with the human eye without magnification, so I have kept a file about microbes, viruses, bacteria, and other nano-sized creepy crawlies for years. I got really interested last year when a brother had a benign cyst removed in a rather simple operation at one of those “clean” California hospitals. But he caught “staph” in the hospital which almost cashed in his formerly healthy chips. It took him several months to recover from the little bugs. During this very serious battle he lost almost 70 pounds and he still doesn’t feel very well after a year.

During his battle, I read of a newly discovered microbe so tiny that four million could fit into the period at the end of this sentence. (At the same time, I have always wondered if the guy who counts them ends up bonkers with quivering lips.)

The unusual thing about this discovery is that they were found in very acidic slime in a Superfund cleanup site at the bottom of an abandoned mine in Shasta County, California, a producer of gold, silver, iron, and copper. The new tiny bug seems to luxuriate in a sulfuric acid bath in the middle of green pond scum. I’m no chemist but I do remember chemistry teacher Ben Eveslage, at Little Falls High School, telling us not to test sulfuric acid by sticking any part of our anatomy in it.

These microbes are 200 nanometers wide (a nano is one-billionth of a meter) and are five times smaller than the average bacteria. A large virus (viruses cannot reproduce on their own) is about the same as this microbe in size.
Scientists who discovered these microbes in drainage water more powerful than battery acid are now working on the proposition that we may have life forms extending miles down into the earth that may exceed all surface life in total mass. Wow! Creepy crawlies everywhere! What a science fiction movie!

Microbes Are Crawling All Over Every ..hmm..Body

Like it or not, each of us is host and chow for somewhere between 500 and 1,000 species of microbes that are nibbling away at us constantly. We may have as many as 8,000 subspecies roaming our nooks and crannies. Specialists are still counting.
Stanford microbiologist David Relman is working on the idea that our microbes are so individual that in the future we will be able to identify a person by checking out his microbes instead of his fingerprints. (It is also exciting to understand that fingerprints may not be as definitive as thought for decades. How many millions have been jailed because of “matched” fingerprints?)

We have ten times as many microbes as we have cells in our body. No wonder cells go off the reservation occaisonally and grow cancers, boils, and and pimply pustules.
When we look at microbes through microscopes we see unbelievable monsters that would make even teenagers cringe. They are crawling all over our eyeballs and trespass into our mouth, ears, nose and other fascinating body orifices.
Thousands of these microbes have not been identified yet. We have a lot of important work to do. That’s why it is so necessary to fund education adequately. We have to remember we have potential geniuses in ghettos, the Hamptons, Greenbush, and Grassy Butte.

Our lives depend on the hundred trillion microorganisms in our intestines that break down toxins and feast on the same foods we do. How these “gut bugs” work will often determine whether we are skinny or obese. Two doctors in a Newsweek article used the example of a cup of Cheerios which is supposed to contain 110 calories. But some people may get 110 calories while others will get only 70 or 80. It depends on how hard your gut bugs work. They suggest that 25 calories difference a day means a person may gain or lose two pounds in a year—or gain 20 pounds in a decade.

Microbes In A Rapidly Shrinking World

At the present time we know of 1,415 infectious diseases caused by bugs and bacteria and we should have enough sense to realize there are probably thousands more. In an article “The Human-Animal Link” by William Karesh and Robert Cook in Foreign Affairs, they indicate that over 60 percent of these diseases infect both animals and humans. Diseases such as anthrax, bubonic plague, Lyme disease, Rift Valley fever, and various monkey poxes have moved from animals to humans.

The authors point out that one of the greatest medical successes of the 20th century was the elimination of smallpox, but if animals had also carried smallpox we would not have had a chance to eliminate it. So far smallpox survives only in humans.
Because of our ability to travel around the world in a few hours, combined with our load of trillions of bugs and bacteria, we can spread diseases around the world in almost a twinkling.

Remember SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) that started in China and spread quickly to other countries? When the Chinese finally figured out what SARS was, after months of study, they closed down their live animal markets and confiscated almost a million animals from private parties. But that was too late. SARS pops up in other countries from time to time.

Another example of how viruses and bacteria can be transported quickly around the world is known as the Wisconsin prairie dog affair. In May of 2003, hospitals in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin started to take in patients with mysterious illnesses. People who had been in close contact with pet prairie dogs developed skin ulcers and fevers. The disease was traced to a Wisconsin prairie dog dealer who had let his animals mix with rodents imported from Ghana. The rodents were carrying the monkeypox virus. The dealer then sold prairie dogs to pet stores in Milwaukee. Within a month there were 71 non-fatal cases of monkeypox in six midwestern states.

Africans Eat Almost 600 Million Wild Animals

People love their pets, drug companies need animals to experiment on, zoos need animals to make money, and schools need animals to dissect, so the annual global trade in live wild things increases every ear. The Wildlife Conservation Society estimates that a million birds, 640,000 reptiles, and 40,000 primates are captured and sold annually.

When SARS broke out in China the Chinese government confiscated 838,500 wild animals from the city markets of Guangdong, China alone. Wild animals are a huge business in Asia because many body parts are used in traditional remedies. I remember CNN showing a video of thousands of little turtles in just one cage in a Chinese animal market.

In other countries individual wild animals are a most important food source. The citizens of Africa consume about 600 million wild animals a year representing over two billion pounds of meat. It’s estimated that Amazonians eat up to 16 million mammals.

As these animals travel around the world or through digestive systems we have to remember that trillions of bugs and bacteria go with them and are eating them at the same time. These bugs are rarely neutral. As the great Crawford philosopher-king said , “They are either with us, or again’ us.” Two mountain hawk-eagles smuggled from Thailand to Belgium in airline carry-ons carried influenza viruses. A shipment of Pakistani parrots, lovebirds , and finches spread a deadly virus in Italy. TB germs originating in domestic cattle have infected wild bison in Canada, deer in Michigan, and cape buffalo and lion prides in Africa. When domestic cattle from India were imported to Kenya, they brought with them rinderpest which killed more buffalo than poachers had killed in 20 years. Sometimes the poorest people on the planet are hit hard by bugs and bacteria. When avian (bird) flu H5N1 was discovered in Asia the authorities killed 140 million chickens to prevent its spread. That’s a lot of buffalo wings.

A Policy of Containment

Unless one wants to live in an immune-suppression tent, one must wash hands to prevent those trillions of bugs from attacking you. It’s all in the hands and what you touch. Researchers report that only 15 percent of people using public restrooms actually wash their hands. Doctors aren’t much better.

Bathing the body is relatively new around the world, although the Romans spent many hours in first-century baths. Elizabeth I of England bragged she bathed about once a month whether she needed it or not. French spies said Louis XIV bathed twice in his life—but he often changed his shirts three times in a day! But you were not considered a gentleman if you did not wash your hands before and after meals. By the way, Norwegians as early as the 13th century had a reputation of not washing hands at the end of a meal.

After plagues swept through Europe in the 17th century, doctors suggested that people who bathed were more susceptible because water opened up the pores and allowed the plague into the body. That idea wiped out cleanliness for another couple of centuries.

But we can’t afford to get too clean. Some people have so many “good” gut bugs they produce 10 percent of their calories from substances created by the bugs. Don’t clean the gut too often.