Managing IAQ to Support Diverse, Healthy Microbiomes
Maintaining IAQ to support beneficial microbes and diminish the presence of pathogenic ones provides each of us with the powerful, personalized medicine of a healthy microbiome.
We have been focusing on a pathogenic virus for several years and may have forgotten that most microbes, meaning bacteria, viruses, and fungi, actually benefit humankind. In fact, we depend on trillions of microbes that reside in and on our body — our microbiome — for our very survival. Food digestion, immune system training, blood clotting, and prevention of invasive infections are just a few of the human physiologic functions that require the help of microbes.
Surprisingly, a given species of bacteria or virus is not binarily good or bad (with a few exceptions) but function along a spectrum ranging from harmful, pathogenic (Greek: the birth of pain) to helpful, or commensurable (Latin: to eat from the same table) strains. The gradation of microbial interactions with humans, from helpful to disease-causing, are driven by both environmental selection pressures and by variations in the robustness of the human host immune system.