Your Healthy Skin Germs Stay Put, Despite Cleaning – WebMD

Findings suggest your ‘microbial fingerprint’ is important to well-being

WebMD News from HealthDay

By Randy Dotinga

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, May 4, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Some things never change, and your personal collection of skin bacteria may be one of them — despite the use of sanitizers and antibacterial wipes.

Human skin encounters countless germs every day, and researchers expected to find that the colonies of bacteria, viruses and fungi in skin fluctuated over time. Instead, they found the germs stay fairly constant.

However, skin hosts micro-environments, which can either attract or repel germs. “We describe the difference between the sweaty armpit and the smooth forearm as being like a rain forest and a desert,” said study co-author Julie Segre.

An analysis of skin samples finds feet, in particular, seem to change the most over time on the germ front, said Segre, a senior investigator with the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute.

The findings aren’t likely to affect the ongoing debate about whether we’re keeping ourselves too clean. These germs can live deep in the skin, allowing them to remain unaffected by hand-washing, said Segre.

Still, the research does offer insight into the “baseline” of your skin, she said, allowing researchers to better understand how things go out of whack. Bacteria, viruses and fungi cause conditions such as acne, athlete’s foot and warts.

The skin’s “microbiome” — containing bacteria, fungi and viruses — is thought to be important to human health. Segre said it can help the body resist nasty germ invaders and maintain the barrier between the skin and inner organs.

The new study aimed to discover how stable these skin germs are over time. This can help researchers understand what happens when skin disease develops, Segre said.

For the study, Segre and colleagues analyzed 17 skin sites of 12 healthy volunteers three times over two years.

The researchers found that skin germs as a whole remained fairly steady, despite the fact that individuals have their own “microbial fingerprints.”

“One person had a higher amount of fungi on their skin, another person had a lot of bacterial viruses on the adverse of their nose,” Segre said. She thought these collections of germs might be temporary, but “when we examined the person’s skin community a year later, it was still true.”