Presenters' interview for The Great British Germ Hunt

3 July 2018

Explain a bit about the show – what’s the idea?

Kate: This is a programme which I think really celebrates bacteria. Ultimately, there’s bacteria out there that is no good for us, but there’s also lots of bacteria out there that is brilliant for us. This film demonstrates just how good that bacteria really is in lots of different walks of life.

Lisa: It’s really quite ground-breaking as well, having a look into the invisible world of bacteria. The technology that was used to get the results that we did was really cutting edge. So it’s a really novel picture of the bacteria that’s around and in us, really.

Kate: Isn’t it the case that we could never have turned these tests around this quickly before?

Lisa: Absolutely. The technology that we use at the festival [where festivalgoers are swabbed to find out about their bacteria] to get the full bacterial metagenomic sequencing in a day, from swabbing someone to getting your result, is absolutely ground-breaking, and really will change the way microbiology is done. To have it on that scale, in the field, was really quite an accomplishment.

 

How much of this was a scientific exercise, and how much was just an excuse for you to go and hang out at a festival for the weekend?

Kate: [Laughs] I wish you’d been with us – you would have see the reality of it. We were working really, really hard, honestly. The scientists who were with us were testing the results until the early hours.

Lisa: They really were.

Joe: the fact that it’s even do-able – as a microbiologist, it’s mind-blowing. There’s just no way we could even conceive of having done something like that just a few years ago. Sequencing DNA itself is a very demanding but really useful technique. But to be able to take a DNA sequencer the size of a stapler to a music festival, and to be able to turn around samples quickly enough to actually tell you all the different bacteria that are living on these people within a day is just incredible. And doing it at a festival is really good, because it really brings home to people what is achievable, and what ground-breaking science is actually out there.

Kate: I would also just like to point out that I didn’t witness any live music, I didn’t see a single band. And I didn’t drink a single beer.

 

Joe and Lisa, can you explain what your jobs are?

Lisa: I have, for the past 20 years, been a medical microbiologist, so I’ve worked at Public Health England for nearly 13 years. I’m more interested in clinical microbiology. My specialism is molecular microbiology, so I have lots of experience with the technology that they were sequencing with. My PhD thesis was looking at norovirus on cruise ships.

Joe: I’m more focussed on bacteria, so my PhD was all about what makes bacteria behave in the way they do. So what I was specifically looking at was bacteria’s ability to produce communities. And what these communities do is that they’re really organised, and when they live together like this they can control their behaviour, and they can work in very specific ways. So through my interest in that, I ended up looking into dental plaque, another form of one of these communities. It’s really complex and interesting. And now I’m a lecturer in antibiotic resistance, and my research is all about looking at how bacteria interact with us, with our bodies, and with each other, and how that interaction is affected when we do stupid things like take loads of antibiotics when we don’t need to.

 

Kate has alluded to this, but one of the absolutely key elements of the show is the idea of good and bad bacteria. Can you explain a little more about this?

Kate: I absolute layman’s terms, here’s the one sentence that I always remember, and then the scientists can give you more detail. But it all comes down to: “Poo bad, soil excellent.” It’s the faecal bacteria you have to worry about.

Joe: What I think this programme does really well is address the balance. People think of bacteria as bad and evil and causing disease, with maybe the occasional acknowledgement that you can drink a yoghurt that might do something good to you. I think this programme explains that it’s not as simple at that. There’s a whole range of bacteria that live on or in us. There are tens of trillions of bacteria that live on our skin or in our gut or in our mouth. The simple fact is, if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t survive. They’re absolutely integral to our health.

Lisa: They’re integral to everything – to your immune system, your digestion, your heart, everything.

Joe: Absolutely. Your microbiome – these tens of trillions of bacteria – are the link between you and the outside world. Everything you do, everything you eat, is first processed by these bacteria. You have to take care of these bacteria and make sure what you’re doing isn’t affecting them. If it does, that’s going to have an important knock-on effect to your health. There’s lots of bacteria on your skin, for example, that stop you getting infections caused by other bacteria.

 

Are you essentially saying that keeping ourselves and our environs too clean is bad for us?

Joe: That’s spot on.

Lisa: 110 per cent, yeah.

Kate: And in our little film, what is great is that ultimately these people who come to the festival for the weekend, at the end of it their own personal microbiomes are in better nick than when they arrived, because ultimately, at home, they’re too clean, their houses are too clean, and it’s really good to wear the same pair of pants for the weekend and to sleep in your clothes and to sleep with a dog. We found that people who had a dog sleeping in their tent with them had more diverse microbiomes. And we also did a story about kissing. Kissing is a brilliant thing, it’s a fantastic way to transfer bacteria from one person to another. So the message is basically get grubby and snog.

 

‘Get grubby and snog?’ Is it possible the entire premise of this programme was created by a 15-year-old boy?

Lisa: Sounds about right actually.

Joe: I’m not sure the producer will be too happy about that!

 

You did a nationwide survey of germs – what kind of data did it reveal?

Lisa: I looked at the data myself, and I was blown away by the level of diversity at each of the sites. In each one of the 14 sites we tested, there were over a thousand types of bacteria. Most of them were bacteria that wouldn’t cause us farm. For me as a medical microbiologist – I’m not an environmental microbiologist – I’d be looking through the list, and unless I recognise the name of something, it’s probably not going to do us any harm. I had to look up so many of the species to even know what they were.

 

Did anything that came to light during the show surprise any of you?

Lisa: I guess the main thing I was surprised about was that there aren’t as many pathogens or bad bacteria lurking about as you would think. When we did the home swabbing, getting the results of that was interesting. I think I’m pretty level-headed, but when I had a newborn baby, I really upped the level of cleaning in the house. But if I’d had the information from this programme, I probably wouldn’t have been quite so crazy about that sort of thing. So I got an education too.

Kate: Lisa, does that mean when I have my baby in two months, I don’t actually have to do much anymore? [There then ensues a conversation where we all discuss Kate’s pregnancy and get very excited about babies, but nobody needs to read that.]

 

Hold on a minute, all that sanctimonious stuff about how you didn’t even have a beer at the festival now becomes a bit more apparent!

Kate: Yes, okay, I was about nine weeks pregnant. There was that, too!

 

So, speaking of kids and bacteria, can you answer the age old question: Is it okay, if your kid drops food on the floor, for them to pick it up and eat it?

Joe: There’s two extra things to think about with respect to babies. For us to be out and about and picking stuff up off the floor and getting muddy and everything is fantastic. Withy babies you have to be a little bit more careful. Their immune systems aren’t as developed. The second thing is their microbiomes, this diverse community, this ecosystem of bacteria, is developing very, very quickly. In the womb, they have no bacteria at all, they’re completely sterile, so they’re actually very vulnerable. During birth and the month afterwards they become inundated with all these bacteria. They get a lot from their mother. That’s why we kiss babies, it’s giving our protective bacteria to them. So because their microbiome is still developing, we do have to be a bit more careful with bacteria with babies. But once they’re eating normal food and crawling around on the floor, you kind of end up thinking “Why am I still sterilising their bottle when they’re licking the floor?

 

Kate, as a non-scientist, will some if what you learned change the way you behave?

Kate: It’s definitely encouraged me to kiss a little bit more. My husband and others! Pecks on the cheek are all good. It’s good to be around other people, to be exposed to other people’s bacteria. And the other thing I’m working on is getting a dog. But that comes after the baby. That will improve the microbiome of our home.

Lisa: Don’t let it go to sleep on your pillow, though.

 

Yes! You found a woman in the programme who let her dog sleep on her bed, and what was the name of the bacteria you found on her pillow?

Lisa: That was eubacterium rectale. The rectale bit is never good news.

 

Joe, you mentioned your speciality. Is it a reality that bacteria are becoming more resistant to antibiotics? Are we going to be at the mercy of bad bacteria in the future?

Joe: If things keep going the way their going, it’s an absolute certainty. What we’re finding is the more people use antibiotics, the more resistance we get. So if people use antibiotics when they don’t need them, which a lot of people do, or if they don’t finish their course properly, or if they take a few here and there and then save some for when they next have a cold, if antibiotics are over-used or wrongly used, that’s the pressure bacteria need to become resistant. So if we carry on using antibiotics, there will always be growing resistance. That’s something we really, really need to think about. Also, another thing to consider is that antibiotics kill bacteria, and we have trillions of bacteria keeping us alive and well, so every time we take antibiotics we’re killing part of our health. I think that’s why, since the introduction of mass antibiotics in the 1940s, we’ve had a such a massive increase in diseases related to immunity, like asthma and allergies and diabetes and obesity and depression. Bacteria are integral to any immune-related disease. We kill them all the time and they’re not going to be able to do their job properly, and we become more susceptible to these diseases.

 

Joe, Lisa, do you have a favourite bacteria?

What one thing could people change about their lifestyle to boost their healthy bacteria, or diminish their unhealthy bacteria?

Joe: Like Kate was saying – get out. Get out, get muddy, enjoy the outdoors.

Kate: Gardening is great. Gardeners have some of the best microbiomes out there. Their gut bacteria is incredibly diverse.

Lisa: There’s a reason gardeners are happy people on the whole.

 

Obviously bacteria is good, we’ve established that, but is it still safe to say there’s nowhere more hazardous in the world than a festival toilet?

Lisa; They made me go in one!

Joe: You survived that.

Kate: Actually, the results from the festival toilets were really, really surprising. Essentially, there was nothing to report. Because they’re one of those areas that are repeatedly sanitised with antibacterial cleaners. So we really didn’t find much there.

Joe: I imagine if she got right down into the tank she’d get a different response.

Kate: I’m sure it depends what festival you’re at as well. This was a really nice festival, with very clean toilets. Glastonbury, day five, I imagine is a little different.

 

The Great British Germ Hunt is on Sunday 8th July, 7pm, Channel 4.