You may not have met one in person, but microbes are everywhere! They’re on us, in us and around us.
There’s loads of information to learn about microbes. But here’s some quick, fun facts about them:
1) If you get a handful of soil from your garden, you’ll be holding hundreds if not thousands of different kinds of microbes. In a single teaspoon of soil there will be 1 billion bacteria, 120,000 fungi & 25,000 algae!
2) Microbes have been around longer than anything else on Earth – even dinosaurs!
3) If you put all the bacteria from a human’s digestive system on a set of scales, they would weigh about 1 kilogram. That’s the same as a standard bag of sugar! There are 10 times more bacteria in the average human’s digestive system than there are cells in the entire body.
4) There are more microbes on one person’s hand than there are people on the planet. That’s well over 7 billion microbes on a single hand!
5) At least half of the oxygen we breathe is generated by microbes.
6) Most microbes don’t cause disease. Less than 5% do.
7) When cows fart and burp, they produce about 20% of the methane gas on the Earth!
8) A study found that 30% of all people didn’t wash their hands after using a public bathroom. But 90% said they did. Just think what may be on their hands!
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