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Bacteria are nature’s primary cleaners and decomposers: recycling elements and restoring areas by breaking down once living or organic material to provide nutrients for building new life. Without the action of bacteria, the world as we know it would not survive even a few weeks.
Bacteria are everywhere. They are on your skin, in your mouth, your saliva. They are on your desktop, on your dinner plate, your car, in your washed laundry. There are more bacteria on your skin than cells in your body.
The bacteria on a typical surface are a complete population of different types (good & bad) - some brought in by the wind, some by water, some by other means such as from shoes, hands, clothing, dirty rags, or even wastes. Any environment that does not actively kill off bacteria will become populated or re-populated. Dryness, sunlight and other conditions slow the growth of such microbes but they will nevertheless be present.
In some of these places or surfaces they play an active, positive role, and in many instances they are simply present on the surface or carried along. Most bacteria are either benign or actively produce benefits for human life. Some bacteria - relatively few by comparison - are pathogens and can cause serious disease.
We do not have the technology to selectively kill pathogens. To kill pathogens in an area, we need to kill all the bacteria. Unless the area cleaned is protected from recontamination, bacteria (including undesirable types) will grow back. Sometimes the undesirable types – like those persistent weeds in a garden – may become hardier than the desirable ones.
What if we could selectively displace or remove the pathogens, and leave the surface protected against repopulation by new pathogens? “Biocontrol” does exactly that. Biocontrol is simply using beneficial bacteria to control pathogens.
There are many examples of biocontrol products on the market today. One product uses good bacteria to prevent the growth of Salmonella. As baby chicks hatch they are essentially sterile. By spraying the right microbes on these chicks as they hatch, we can help populate the gut with organisms that will establish a population and resist colonization by Salmonella. It has been proven to reduce Salmonella by over 90%. Mosquito control with Bacillus thuringensis is another example. In this case the bacteria actually produce a crystal that kills the larvae of mosquitoes where they breed. Biofungicides control the growth of mold pathogens in turf.
Promicrobial cleaning technology provides many benefits. It deep cleans by penetrating into the smallest cracks, junctures, or pores of a surface to release and degrade organic soils. By removing organic soils, it provides long lasting odor control since odors are generally produced by organic soil. These microbes can limit the growth of pathogens without the use of toxic chemicals. Surfaces cleaned with a promicrobial product will retain a residual population of friendly microbes that continues to clean - whenever even minimal moisture and organic soils are present - after the cleaning person has left the area. As unfriendly microbes, such as gram negative strains, are deposited on the surface, the controlling microbes actually prevent the growth of these potential pathogens.
