When I die, fungi and bacteria will eat me down to the bone. Why don’t they start to now?
It’s not for lack of trying. Your body spends a lot of resources fighting back.
Your immune system stops working after you’re dead.
In some cases, it stops working before you’re dead. That generally sucks.
Cancer patients, AIDS patients, transplant recipients and others whose treatment leaves them with a suppressed immune system will not infrequently develop all sorts of bacterial, viral or fungal infections that a healthy person wouldn’t even notice. When my mother was on chemo, she developed a ghastly case of candida (a fungus).
I’ve read that we are in fact being eaten up all the time; it’s just that we’re also replacing cells all the time. Every notice how people’s breath can smell soooo bad? Those bacteria aren’t living on love, they’re eating your mouth.
I thought they were eating wasted food and the mouths secretions, not actual living tissue ?
Besides, as I understand it, most of the stuff that lives on us while we are alive isn’t dangerous, but symbiotic. Either it provides us with something we need or it crowds out the dangerous organisms.
IANAD. I thought it was more than the remaining food, and I thought it was actually a Cecil column that I learned this from. I’d call my mother (a Nurse Practitioner), but she’s in Europe.
if you want to find a bug that does eat you alive just search for necrotizing fasciitis
e.g. here are some gruesome photos tonyrogers.com/ humor/necrotizing.htm