Biofilms Can Make Us Sick
 Pick up a paper or turn on the evening news and you'll hear about the rise in the number of food borne illnesses from Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli. Add to this the lack of effective intervention methods and it becomes down right nerve wracking.
Currently, there is ongoing intense scientific research into food poisoning prevention efforts. According to a Scientific Status Summary published in Jan 2009 by the Institute of Food Technologists, a promising solution may be interfering with "quorum sensing", a complicated network of cell-to-cell communication in bacteria that may cause food borne illness.
Interfering with bacterial communication obstructs the growth of bacterial communities known as biofilms that can form on foods such as fresh produce. A biofilm might appear, for example, as a sticky film on a melon. Resistant to many conventional washing methods, biofilms cause persistent low-level contamination of foods.
But it's not just biofilm on food that makes us sick. Biofilms grow virtually everywhere, in almost any environment where there is a combination of moisture, nutrients, and a surface. It turns out that a vast number of the pathogens we harbor are grouped into communities called biofilms. In simple terms this means that bacteria can join together on essentially any surface and start to form around their group a protective medium or matrix made of polymers – substances composed of molecules with repeating structural units that are connected by chemical bonds.
Bacterial biofilms have great potential for causing human disease. Their ability to cause debilitating chronic infections has become very clear. The National Institutes of Health recently stated that more than 65% of all microbial infections are caused by biofilms. It should come as no surprise that biofilm researchers will also tell you that if you are immunocompromised you are at greater risk.
A few of the diseases associated with biofilms are:
- Pneumonia
- Septicemia
- Abscesses
- Appendicitis
- Bronchitis
- Allergies
- Nosocomial surgical infections
- Gastrointestinal infections
- Skin, head, and neck infections Dental infections
- Cholera
- Cystic fibrosis
- Chronic relapsing infections
- Infection from medical implant materials
- Kidney stones
- Urinary tract infections
- Catheter infections
- Middle-ear infections
- Endocarditis
- Prosthetic joint biofilm infections
- Leptospirosis Infections associated with contact lens use
- Chronic inflammatory deseases
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