Microorganisms – Balancing acts in Food, Environment and Medicine: 

Microorganisms have significant roles in our lives, both beneficial and harmful. Friendly microorganisms are used in food preparations like curd, bread, and cake. They are important in environmental clean-up because they break down organic waste into harmless substances. They are utilized in medicine preparation. They enhance soil fertility through nitrogen fixation.

How do microorganisms impact our well-being, sustain life and influence the future?

• Role in Food Production: Making of Curd and Bread: Bacterium, Lactobacillus, promotes curd formation by converting milk.
  • Bacteria and yeast aid in food fermentation, such as in idlis and dosa batter.
  • Yeast’s carbon dioxide production during respiration is used in the baking industry.

• Commercial Use of Microorganisms: Crafting alcohol through fermentation: Microbes, especially yeast, aid in producing alcohol, wine, and acetic acid.
  • The process of converting sugar into alcohol using yeast is termed fermentation.

• Medicinal Use of Microorganisms: Healing power of antibiotics in health and agriculture: Antibiotics, sourced from microbes, combat disease-causing microbes.
  • • Examples: Streptomycin, tetracycline, erythromycin.
    • Antibiotics are also added to livestock feed to prevent microbial infections and control plant diseases.
• Vaccination in building immunity: Introducing dead or weakened microbes into a healthy body makes it produce antibodies against those microbes.
• These antibodies provide protection against certain diseases.
• Vaccination can prevent diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox, and hepatitis.
• Increasing Soil Fertility and Cleaning the Environment: Certain bacteria can fix atmospheric nitrogen, enriching the soil and enhancing its fertility, these bacteria are known as biological nitrogen fixers.
• Microbes assist in converting plant and food wastes into manure. 
• Figure The Nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria (blue-green algae).

Microorganisms Endangering Plants, Animals and Humans:

• While many microorganisms are beneficial, several are harmful and cause diseases in humans, plants, and animals. These disease-causing entities are termed pathogens. 

Communicable diseases and their modes of transmission in humans

• Pathogens can invade our systems via the air, water, food, or direct contact.
• Communicable Diseases  in Human Health: Diseases that spread from an infected individual to a healthy one are termed communicable diseases.
  • Examples: cholera, common cold, chicken pox, and tuberculosis.
• The common cold, for instance, spreads when an infected person sneezes, releasing virus-laden droplets into the air.

Role of insects and animals in pathogen transmission:

• Houseflies, which frequent garbage and excreta, can transfer pathogens to uncovered food.
• Female Anopheles mosquito carries the malaria parasite.
• Female Aedes mosquito is a carrier of the dengue virus.

Practical measures to prevent Pathogen Transmission:

• Always cover food and avoid consuming exposed food items.
• Prevent water accumulation to stop mosquito breeding.
• Maintain clean and dry surroundings.

Animal Diseases: What causes them?

• Microbes also inflict diseases on animals.
• Anthrax affects both humans and cattle and is caused by a bacterium.
• The foot and mouth disease in cattle is due to a virus.

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