There are a lot of jobs out there that are depended on knowing about microbes and whether they are pathogenic or benign. Many tricky situations can be solved by bringing microbiology into the picture. Industries employ microbiologists for this very reason. Here are some of the applications of microbiology with respect to health.
- Medical Care
The healthcare industry is one of the biggest industries in the world and microbiology is an essential part of the entire industry. Just in this industry, there are plenty of health care professionals whose job it is to think about microbes on a daily basis. They include nurses and doctors, Pharmacists, Clinical Microbiologists, Obstetricians and midwives, Public health officials.
- Dental Care
The oral cavity or the mouth has the largest microbial diversity of any site in the human body. There are several hundred species of bacteria living in your mouth. So a big part of dentistry is to know about these microbes.
- Veterinary Care
A veterinarian is a special type of doctor whose job it is to keep pets, livestock and other animals healthy. The type of microbiology used in veterinary medicine is similar to human medicine, just that the pathogens involved have different names.
Many times when a pet gets sick with an unknown disease, the doctor would turn to use fundamental microbiology to figure out if the cause is microbial in nature. Microscopy, Gram staining of body fluids and stool and culturing swabs are some of the tests that veterinarians employ.
- Monitoring the Environment:
Other than the health of humans and animals, microbiology can also be employed to check the health of our environment. National environment monitoring programs, like the U.S. Geological Survey, use microbiology to affect environmental conservation and for other basic research. The applications of microbiology with respect to the environment include:
- Monitoring how climate change is affecting the population of microbes
- Wildlife conservation
- Studying how micro-organisms interact with their environments.
- Studying how micro-organisms interact with non-living things in their environment.
- Combining all of these activities to get the big picture of the overall ecosystem and its functioning.
- Making Plants healthier
Farmers and horticulturists use microbiology almost every day to keep their plant pathogens away from their plants. There are hundreds of species of microbes that infect plant tissue which ultimately causes the plant to die. Plants infected with microbial pathogens are less healthy, and usually, have blemishes and will generally die despite giving treatment.
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