Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) suffer from skin irritations, allergies and infections including fungus, cold sores and shingles. According to research published in Cell, the cause may be the absence of environmental microbes normally found on Earth. In other words, the ISS is too sterile, harboring only human bacteria and lacking those from soil and water, which are crucial for the immune system. During its 25-year history, more than 280 astronauts have been stationed on the ISS. Scientists are now studying ways to introduce beneficial microbes inside the orbiting laboratory without risk of pathogenic proliferation to improve astronauts’ health on future space missions.
Specifically, to study the environmental conditions inside, Rob Knight, director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at the University of California at San Diego, along with other researchers from UCSD, a public academic institution located in La Jolla, California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration worked together by swabbing more than 700 surfaces to identify and catalog the type of microbes living on the space station. The bacteria they identified there were mostly those that live on humans and were associated with the symptoms complained of by the astronauts. According to the experts, it is also possible that the limited water conditions available for personal hygiene and the fact that astronauts have to wear the same clothes for two weeks in a row, because on the orbiting laboratory they do not have the opportunity to wash them regularly, can certainly contribute to the possibility of developing skin disorders.
“The immune system needs exposure to a wide range of beneficial microbes from places like soil, healthy animals and healthy plants,” Knight said. “Figuring out if there is a way to bottle those healthy microbes or provide them in an ecosystem in space that astronauts can maintain is a very interesting research topic right now.”
