Ever get that buggy, itchy feeling? You know, the one where it feels like things are crawling on you (on in you)? Well, guess what?
They are!
"The life on man consists of microbes, microbes in extraordinary variety and in large numbers. I once counted 80 distinguishable kinds in the mouth, and the total number of bacteria excreted in the feces by an adult each day under normal conditions ranges ... from 100 billion to 100 trillion.
The microbes of our normal population inhabit nearly every surface that is freely exposed, such as the skin, or accessible from the outside, such as the lining of the intestinal tract. Along the length of the alimentary canal, from mouth to anus, some of them grow in particles of food or in what remains of food as it undergoes digestion.
These microbes... take advantage of the warmth and moisture of the environment to live on our food or the products we digest it to, growing as they might grow in an incubator. Some bacteria grow on the products produced by the activities of other bacteria.
But more characteristically, the life on man, including many of the microbes I have just spoken of, is made up of parasites, which grow in more intimate relation to our tissues."
Theodore Rosebury - author of "Life on Man"
(See Scary Reviews - Books for a link to this book.)
Of course, there are also worms that can get into your skin and travel through your body, living off your blood. And don't forget "crabs"... if you have a case of the crabs, you have small insects burrowing into the skin of your pubic area, laying eggs and hatching, all the while feeding off of you. Isn't it nice to be needed?
There is also another parasite I have heard of that lives inside your eyelashes. Occasionally you can feel them move about. - Eeeewwww!! (And you thought that was a twitch?)
To a whole variety of life, you are a world. Kinda makes you wonder if Mother Earth considers humanity to be a bad case of crabs?