Boston's subway system is lingering with germs but the good news are that most of these bugs are harmless to human and will not make you sick.
The study was published online June 28, 2016 in the American Society for Microbiology's journal mSystems. It is the first high-precision microbial survey in a mass-transit environment to evaluate multiple types and materials.
"We were surprised to find that the microbes that we collected on surfaces that people touch--and sometimes sneeze on--had low numbers of worrisome pathogens or antibiotic resistance genes. These environments have drastically lower virulence profiles, in fact, than are observed in a typical human gut," said senior author Curtis Huttenhower, associate professor of computational biology and bioinformatics. "Our findings establish a baseline against which deviations can be used as an early warning system to monitor public health."
"Our microbial surroundings in the subway often look like our normal microbial surroundings," Huttenhower says, "These are the bugs we would have on our bodies anyhow."
The results shown are consistent with previous microbial DNA sequencing-based researches that have discovered that microbial communities in the built environment are largely influenced by their human occupants
Further study will test whether the microbes identified on the subway system are from living or dead organisms.
