The Built Environment Microbiome: A New Frontier in Residential Health Research
For decades, public health research focused on outdoor air pollution, tobacco smoke, and occupational chemical exposures. But a quiet revolution has been underway in laboratories around the world. Scientists have begun to realize that the most significant environmental exposure for most people is not the air outside their windows or the chemicals at their jobs. It is the invisible microbial ecosystem inside their own homes. The built environment microbiome, the community of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that colonizes the surfaces and air of our buildings, has emerged as one of the most exciting and important frontiers in health research. We are learning that the design of our homes, our cleaning habits, and even our choice of building materials directly shape the microbes we live with, and those microbes directly shape our health. This is not niche science. It is a paradigm shift in how we understand the relationship between where we live and how we feel. How Researchers Study th...