I want you to take a deep breath. Have you done it? Good. You just breathed in about half a litre of air. It is possible to capture the liq...
I want you to take a deep breath. Have you done it? Good. You just breathed in about half a litre of air. It is possible to capture the liquid in your breath by cooling it down – a bit like when you breathe on a cold mirror. If you do this, over one minute you can recover 100 microlitres of fluid (about the size of a lentil).
If you then grow what you recover from that fluid you get between 100 and 10,000 bacteria, 5,000 viruses and one or two fungi. Every time we breathe, we inhale a cocktail of potential pathogens. And we inhale about 20 times a minute, nearly 30,000 times a day, sucking in 15,000 litres of air.
The world through which we move is awash with potential pathogens. They are not just in the air we breathe; they are in the water we drink, on the lettuce we eat and in the soil on which we stand. And we don’t just find microorganisms in the external environment; they are on and in us.
Our skin plays host to thousands of bugs and our guts are packed full of bacteria – by some ways of counting there are more cells...
