A NEW WAVE OF BACTERIA IS COMING SOON...
We’re in trouble. Our over-reliance on fossil fuels and our taste for foods with a high carbon footprint is causing disruptive climate change. Our throwaway society has flooded the land and seas with plastic pollution. And we face a growing public health crisis triggered by the rise of disease-causing microbes that we cannot kill with antibiotics.
Now for the good news. The last few years have brought promising evidence that we might be able to pull carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere and slow the pace of climate change, that we have the potential to grow high-quality protein without the large carbon footprint, and that we can clean up our pollution and blunt the impact of antibiotic resistance. The common element in all these potential breakthroughs? Bacteria. As unlikely as it might sound, our future health and happiness might be secured by these humble microbes.
HUMAN HEALTH
Beneficial bugs that heal the body
“Some strains of E. coli can seek out and grow inside tumours, making them a suitable vehicle to deliver cancer therapeutics”
Bacteria can be terrible for human health. They trigger deadly diseases including tuberculosis and cholera. As a consequence, bacteria-killing antibiotics have been called one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th Century: penicillin alone has saved an estimated 200 million lives over the last 80 years.
But bacteria can also be great for human health. Recently, we’ve learned that each of us carries trillions of beneficial bacteria and other microbes on our skin and inside our guts. Not only can they help us extract energy from our food, these ‘good’ bacteria sometimes protect us from disease-causing ‘bad’ bacteria. This is because the bad bugs can’t colonise our guts if the good bacteria take up all of the available space.
Or they do unless we disturb them. A downside of taking a prolonged course of antibiotics is that the drugs can kill off some of the good bacteria in our gut, offering disease-causing microbes like an opportunity to take up residence there. infections can cause diarrhoea, nausea and