Kellyn Betts has an article in Environmental Health Perspectives this month about something that hasn't recieved a lot attention in the health policy and health delivery sectors yet, but certainly will do soon. It's the microbiome. Her article A Study in Balance: How Microbiomes Are Changing the Shape of Environmental Health shows why this is an emerging field of research that has so many people excited.
For those not familiar with the term, microbiomes are the tiny ecosystems of microbes and other little critters that live on and in each of us. There are an estimated 100 trillion microbes now going about their business in four major biomes: the mouth and gastrointestinal tracts, the respiratory system, the urogenital systems and the skin. Microbes are so important to our ability to function that microbiologists are proposing to call us all "superorganisms," that is, symbiants of us and our bacteria. There has been so much interest in the microbiome that the National Institute of Health has set up the Human Microbiome Project to study them. We all learned in high school that microorganisms break down complex carbohydrates and help us to digest our Cheerios, but systems biologists are just now starting to unwind the much more complex ways that these organisms keep us going. Early results indicate that bacteria affect the way some toxins are introduced into our systems. Other studies now in the pipeline are looking at how disturbances in our intestinal biomes may be implicated in diseases such as acne, Crohn's disease, and obesity.
