Washington: Personal hygiene is good, but to be cleaner is not necessarily to be healthier, suggests a study, which found that the diverse community of bacteria help to keep the skin healthy by preventing infections with more harmful microbes.
"What I found most surprising was the great diversity of bacteria living on the skin," said Julia Segre of the US National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the research.
According to the first big census of microbes, parts of the body such as the moist armpits were akin to tropical rainforests in terms of the type of ecosystem the bacteria inhabit, whilst other areas of skin were like dry deserts.
"The second most surprising finding was that the skin was like a desert with moist areas like streams such as the armpits, and isolated oases of life where there are rich reservoirs of deep diversity, such as the navel," said genetics specialist Segre, whose study is published in the journal Science.
The human bodies are ecosystems, believed home to trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that naturally coexist in the skin, the digestive tract and other spots. Sure they cause odor, "but they also keep your skin moist and make sure if you get a wound that (dangerous) bacteria do not enter your bloodstream," she underlined.