Germs: A Beginner's Guide

Did you just sneeze and not cover your mouth? Do you know how many germs you just spread? This is a good example of how germs spread. Do you ever wonder about germs? If you do, you're in luck! You are in luck because once you are done reading this whole article, you will know everything you need to know about germs.

Good and Bad Germs

Germs can be good and bad. For example, some good germs are the ones that fight off bad germs like influenza, chickenpox, HIV/AIDS and so many others. I started off by doing an interview with Mary Sue Southon, a Middle School Science Teacher at Zurich International School. Ms. Southon said, “So the ones that are helpful are the ones that live in our microbiome and intestines. [Also,] the ones that make yogurt and ones that make bread. [The germs] that cause disease are the ones we would call pathogens. Pathogens cause different sorts of infections from viral infections like flu and athlete’s foot which is in between your toes.” So, the good germs are the ones that are naturally in food. They are also the ones that fight off the bad germs in your body. This proves that there are some good germs and some bad germs. But how do we prevent diseases?

Where germs come from

Germs can come from anywhere and anything. We just have to know how to prevent them. While I was interviewing Ms. Southon, she also explained how and what we can use to prevent these germs. Ms. Southon said, “We can cover our noses and mouths if we have a cough. Or if we sneeze, we can wash our hands regularly because our hands are the things that touch everything and then we touch our faces.” Let's stop here. According to Ms. Southon, we should cover our noses and our mouths when we cough and sneeze. This is to block our little droplets from spreading around in the air, which then exposes other people to your germs. Moving on, Ms. Southon also said, “ You should have good personal hygiene in which you shower regularly, especially when you are a teenager and the composition of your sweat changes. The microbes really like to eat the fatty sweat which is what causes the smell.” Now that we know how to prevent germs, let's figure out what we should do if we get sick.

Getting sick

When people get sick, they should stay home. This is so you don’t spread the illness you have with other people that you make contact with. You could also take certain drugs so that you can get better faster. When I asked Ms. Southon the question, “ what do we use to cure sicknesses?” she answered, “Our first line of defense is our body’s immune system… we [also] have a range of different drugs that we can use. [For example,] antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections but we have not discovered a new antibiotic for a long time. There are antiviral drugs but we don’t have very many of those, but in the news just now there is a new antiviral just being released to treat COVID. [We also have] antifungal drugs that are used to treat fungal infections.” There are so many cures for different types of diseases. But what are some very common ones that you would get vaccines for?

“ Our first line of defense is our bodies the immune system trying to fight anything that is foreign to our bodies that enters in.”

- Ms. Southon

Illnesses to watch out for

There are so many illnesses that you have to watch out for and ones that you need to get vaccines for. But I will be telling you about some common ones. In the interview with Ms. Southon, she said, “Childhood illnesses that kids will go and get vaccines for are things like measles and mumps and rubella and chickenpox. We try to vaccinate kids against those things so they don’t catch them. Tetanus is another one that you will go and get a vaccine for, human papillomavirus, and they vaccinate you for those things. There are lots of childhood illnesses and there is an arrangement of vaccines to try and limit their spread, but people still get them. There are other things like Ebola where every so often there is an outbreak in West Africa or there is a plasmodium that is transferred by mosquitoes that cause malaria.” There are other illnesses like fever, influenza, the cold, pink eye, and so many others. There are so many ways to treat these illnesses as I said in the previous paragraph. Doesn’t all of the stuff we talked about to make us wonder if there is going to be another illness outbreak in the future?

Will there be more germs to come in the future?

According to Ms. Southon, it is a possibility. Ms. Southon and I talked about the same thing in my interview with her. Ms. Southon stated, “For sure because every time a living organism reproduces or a virus, they are the ones that are kind of nonliving category every time they reproduce, they change a little bit and you never know what the change is going to make them into. Or we have the other risk that at some other set of microorganisms or virus or bacteria moves from the animal populations and to humans [which] they may think that COVID came from bats, swine flu came from pigs, bird flu came from chickens, so they can jump between species and that can cause a huge problem for us.” So yes, there will be other microorganisms to enter our world.

All that we have to do to prevent the spread of bad germs is to be cautious, wash our hands, cover our nose and mouth, and stay home when we are sick. This is how germs can affect our everyday lives, for good or for bad.