Broad spectrum antibiotics are designed to wipe out a wide spectrum of bacteria, so even if we don't know what exactly is causing an illness, these antibiotics are supposed to take care of it, and they do. However, by design, they also decimate your microbial flora. Your microbiome is like your inner ecosystem, which is all the bacteria and microbes that live in and all around the body.

Most of the time, microbes that are grown together are not happy because they are utilizing the same resources. Depending on the nutrients offered, they will compete and even try to kill one another.

Not really. If a microbe were to produce an antibiotic, it would decimate their own environment. Instead of producing antibiotics, microbes are producing a protein called bacteriocin, which caseus pores in the bacteria, thus destroying it.

No. By living together, you already share your microbiome with your pets. If you’re healthy now, there is no worry.

In this particular case the equipment is being transported outside of the hospital and according to Dr. Peg Riley, most of the bacteria and viruses aren’t going to survive. If you are healthy, your microbiome is what is keeping you healthy, smart, and less depressed.

When you’re born with a c-section, you don’t gain the benefit of your mother’s microbiome that’s passed on to you from the birthing canal. In a c-section, you’ll have bacteria found in a hospital rather than the bacteria found in your mom.

Say you have E. coli in your gut and you ingest some undercooked meat with new E. coli. It will do one of two things. It has to survive in your gut, which it has evolved to do, but also it has to find space in your gut. If there is already E. coli present, it cannot get it, so it produces a bacteriocin to destroy those already present and competing strains.