Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are plagued by persistent rashes, unusual allergies and a variety of infections, including fungi, cold sores and shingles.
Researchers now think they know why: The orbiting lab doesn’t have enough germs.
Bacteria typically found in or on the body arrive in space with their human hosts, but the array of free-living microbes found on Earth—in soil and water—is lacking.
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This kind of microbial imbalance has been linked to chronic inflammatory diseases, and scientists hypothesize that cultivating a diverse set of microbes on the ISS—and the station’s eventual replacement—could improve astronaut health.
“There’s a big difference between exposure to healthy soil from gardening versus stewing in our own filth, which is kind of what happens if we’re in a strictly enclosed environment with no ongoing input of those healthy sources of microbes from the outside,” said Rob Knight, director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at the University of California, San Diego.
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More than 280 astronauts have visited the ISS in its 25-year history, and to better understand the conditions, Knight, other researchers from UCSD and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration worked together to map the microbes living on the space station. The station, they found, is more sterile than living quarters on Earth, and the bacteria they identified there were associated with immune-related symptoms.
The findings were published last month in the journal Cell.
To map the microbes, astronaut and microbiologist Kathleen Rubins and other crew members swabbed more than 700 surfaces on the space station and more than 60 controls. Most of the bacteria they found were those that live on humans. Almost none was bacteria normally found in the Earth’s soil and water.
“Your immune system needs exposure to a wide range of beneficial microbes from places like soil, healthy animals and healthy plants,” Knight said. “Understanding whether there is a way to bottle those healthy microbes or supply them in an ecosystem in space that astronauts can maintain is a very interesting topic of research at the moment.”
It’s also possible that living conditions on the station contribute to some of the skin ailments, according to Rubins.
“We don’t have showers on the ISS and can only use a small amount of water to wash,” Rubins wrote in an email to The Wall Street Journal. “We wear our clothes for two weeks straight because we don’t have a way to do laundry in space.”
As humans push to explore beyond Earth, space travelers will have to understand how to promote a diversity of healthy microbes, Rubins said.
“We probably need to bring a little more of the outdoors inside,” she said. “But we have to do that safely so we don’t have fungal overgrowth or anything pathogenic.”
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