Fascinating

Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science has a post up about the "bacterial zoo" living on your skin.

It's really pretty amazing how many different little critters are hanging around all the time--and what a huge fraction of them are actually perfectly harmless.

It makes me wonder--when you see those articles in magazines etc. talking about all the different kinds of bacteria living on your keyboard, phone, desk, etc, they never actually say how many of them are pathogenic. My guess is that, unless you've recently had a bacterial infection, most of those bacteria the media like to use for scare tactics are actually quite harmless. But I could be wrong. Anyone have any data on that?

UPDATE: Here's a link to the "official" summary of the article from Science.