You are sitting there smugly thinking that you are in charge of your own body, and that you should be, because it is after all your body.  Well, you’re wrong.

The June 2007 Special Issue of Discover Magazine contains an article called “Your body is a planet.”  This article, written by Josie Glausiusz, recognizes that the average human body has 100 trillion cells. (Remember how much one trillion is?). I would have provided the link for this Discover article, but I did not see it anywhere at the Discover site.

Here’s the money question:  what percentage of those 100 trillion cells contain your DNA?  The answer is only 10%.  The other 90% of the cells in your body belong to “aliens”: bacteria, fungi and other microbes.

Most of the time we share our bodies harmoniously within 90 trillion or so microbes.  But sometimes the arrangement turns contentious, as when bloodsucking bedbugs, fleas and lives in beta, or when herpes simplex or human papillomaviruses cause surface membranes to erupt in nasty pustules or warts.

These “visitors” include athletes foot fungi, Streptococcus sanguis (that resides in dental plaque), vaginal flora, the chickenpox virus that lies dormant (for the most part) near our spinal cords and the one trillion bacteria that live in the average human’s skin.

It is commonly known that helpful bacteria live in the human gut.  Did you know, however, that the average human carries around 3.3 pounds of bacteria in the gut?

I also learned about demodex …