A hospital room may feel sterile but it is a teeming, constantly changing world of microbes, according to an article on the PBS website.

Disease-causing agents are a constant in hospitals — and are nothing new. Every day one out of 25 patients gets at least one infection.

“What is new — and is critically important and interesting — is that some people are trying to understand the entire ecosystem instead of just the impact of pathogens,” Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, said in the article.

 “If we want to understand why MRSA is spreading in a hospital, we probably should understand the entire collection of microbes in the hospital.”

Eisen’s lab oversees the Microbiology of the Built Environment Network (microBEnet), an online resource that tracks around two dozen groups working to understand microbes in hospitals, and other built environments including buildings, cars and airplanes, the article said.

Some research suggests that the rest of the microbial community in the hospital impacts how pathogens are transferred in much the same way as when a pathogen that finds its way into a river suddenly finds itself surrounded by soil bacteria and often is outcompeted and unable to survive, the article said.

It’s possible, then, that less sterile rooms could reduce the prevalence of harmful microbes.

Read the article.