Microbes essay

Microbes in environment and health Micro-organisms are very dangerous but they can also help you. They cure you but they can also kill you. They have been around longer than dinosaurs. They can adjust to almost any environment. There are six types of microbes. There is Archaea, Bacteria, Fungi, Protista, Viruses and Microbial mergers. Microbes play a big part in people’s health and in the environment. Good Microbes play a big part in people’s health. They mostly play bad parts in health even though the ratio of bacteria in your body is 85% good bacteria and 15% bad bacteria. In World War 1 more people died of illnesses caused by infection than the in actual war. Bacteria multiples really fast – like once every 20 minutes! So let’s say if you have 1 bacterium at 9am on Monday, by noon you will have 512 and 8 by 4pm you will have over 2 million and by the time you go to bed (8pm) you will have nearly 9 thousand million! Bad bacteria like the Clostridium family, of botulism fame, live in our guts and dine on our Western diets of high fat, high sugar and processed foods. These bacteria can produce toxins that are released into the bloodstream and could affect the brain in a bad way. Microbes also play good parts in people’s health. The microbes that normally live in association with humans on the various surfaces of the body, such as Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium (which are found in yogurt), are known to protect their hosts from infections, and otherwise promote nutrition and health. It could maybe even be used for fighting cancer. We tend to think of microbes as bad—pathogens that need to be killed—but new research suggests that storing scores of them is paramount to our health and metabolism. It appears that bacteria can affect energy absorption. The amount of energy is small, but researchers wonder if over time this could be a factor in weight maintenance. The world has become obsessed with destroying bacteria, attacking the microbes we pair with infection and death. But not only are many types of bacteria helpful, some hold the key to fighting global warming, pollution and breaking down plastic. The beneficial effects of microbes derive from their metabolic activities in the environment, their associations with plants and animals, and from their use in food production and biotechnological processes. Microbes invariably enter into beneficial, sometimes essential, associations with higher forms of organisms, including insects, invertebrates, fish, animals and plants. For example, bacteria and other microbes in the intestines of animals and insects digest nutrients and produce vitamins and growth factors. In the plant world, leguminous plants (peas, beans, clover, alfalfa, etc.) live in intimate associations with bacteria that extract nitrogen from the atmosphere and supply it to the plant for growth. The bad bacteria in the environment cause lots of problems – they can cause waste and disease. For example, if you leave food out in the open, it will begin to rot. We can't see them, but we spend much of our lives washing and sanitizing to rid our hands, surfaces and food of them. Most people view bacteria as undesirable, dirty and unwanted.

Citation:
1) http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2011/09/26/beneficial-bacteria-12-ways-microbes-help-the-environment/
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3) http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/11/21/why-bacteria-keep-healthy/
4) http://www.microbeworld.org/types-of-microbes
5) http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/01/31/wall-street-gives-big-thumbs-up-to-good-bacteria.aspx
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