Trillions in Transit, and No One Watching
How the Big Buggy Bill could accelerate the spread of airborne disease
There’s a dangerous comfort in pretending that what we don’t measure doesn’t exist. It absolves us of responsibility. If we don’t monitor the air, we can’t be blamed for what’s in it. If we don’t count the particles, we don’t have to regulate them. But reality doesn’t wait for instrumentation.
Over the course of a typical human life, we take in more than 400 million liters of air—enough to fill 175 Olympic swimming pools. With every breath, we’re not just drawing in oxygen and nitrogen, but also minuscule particles, trace substances, and a mix of soluble and volatile compounds. Consequently, ensuring the environment we inhabit is protected and enables good health should not be a matter of argument, but a given.
When the EPA is defunded, when environmental oversight is dismissed as bureaucratic overreach, we’re not cutting red tape—we’re deliberately blinding ourselves. The cost isn’t just scientific; it’s human. Every asthma spike, every unexplained rash, every community downwind from a factory knows this truth the hard way. Coupled with the gutting of staff and research support at all agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services, and with the sweeping federal cuts just pushed through Congress, the future of healthcare in the United States looks worse than bleak.
Community dialogues for science
At a recent Tilde Cafe event, science writer Carl Zimmer shared insights from his 2025 book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. His talk traced the emergence of aerobiology as a scientific field—one that, remarkably, didn’t exist until a few persistent researchers began asking hard questions.
One such pioneer was Fred Campbell Meier whose curiosity about plant diseases launched a new way of thinking about air itself. His research into wheat rust led him to suspect that the atmosphere itself was a conduit for microscopic life - but to what extent was the reach of this atmosphere. In collaboration with pioneering aviators Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, Meier gathered evidence to support his hunch that even at several hundred feet above sea level, the air was rife with living entities, and that plant diseases were transmissible through air. In fact, in a 1935 paper co-authored by Meier and Lindbergh, in a section titled “HISTORY OF AIR-CONTENT STUDIES” they state “While it is generally known that bacteria, spores of higher fungi and pollen grains are present among dust particles in the atmosphere near the earth's surface, much detailed information of practical value remains to be revealed by further research. The aerial movement of pollen from certain flowering plants concerns the physician who deals with "hay fever" and related troubles. The plant pathologist and the medicopathologist are interested in obtaining facts concerning the part that air currents may play in disseminating reproductive bodies of organisms that cause specific diseases of plants and animals. Definite information of this sort is obviously an aid to a well-planned control program.”
An ecosystem in the air
We’re used to thinking of life as belonging to land and sea. But the air is teeming with microorganisms—bacteria, viruses, fungi, pollen, and even insects. Trillions of these particles move through the sky every day, often traveling thousands of miles. This realm, once dismissed as sterile or cursed, turns out to be a vibrant biosphere in its own right.
The 19th-century Irish Potato Famine offered an early lesson in airborne pathogens. At the time, many believed the blight was divine punishment—or that it emerged spontaneously from decaying crops. But more recent research points to Phytophthora infestans, a mold that likely arrived in the U.S. on air currents from Mexico. It settled on potatoes that were bound for Ireland, where the cool, damp climate provided ideal conditions for it to take hold—leading to catastrophe.
The episode illustrates a crucial principle: pathogens that remain dormant or limited in their native environments can wreak havoc when displaced—if the surrounding conditions allow it.
Immunity begins with the air
A newborn’s first breath does more than initiate respiration—it sets into motion a cascade of biochemical and immunological events that shape lifelong health. This moment marks the lungs' transition from a fluid-filled environment to direct exposure to air, and with it, the first encounter with the outside world’s microbial landscape.
When the lungs inflate, epithelial cells release molecular signals—a biochemical wake-up call to the immune system. These early alerts help shape a balanced airway environment, ready for a lifetime of exposure to foreign particles and microorganisms.
With the first breath, airborne microorganisms begin colonizing the upper and lower respiratory tracts. This initial wave of colonization lays the groundwork for the airway microbiome, influencing susceptibility to respiratory diseases and allergic responses later in life.
Like some plant pathogens, some avian and mammalian pathogens are also carried through the air. Outbreaks of diseases like measles, tuberculosis, and COVID are all mediated by airborne transmission.
In 2025, more than fifty years after a reliable vaccine for measles was developed, 35 of 50 states in the US have reported measles cases that are far in excess of any in recent history. Similarly, while scientists have dedicated their careers towards understanding and developing tools to fight other airborne diseases, decision-makers seem hell bent in throwing caution to the winds, ignoring the importance of monitoring air quality and the implementation of key processes to maintain it at healthy levels.
Breathing connects to the gut microbiome
Intriguingly, what infants breathe can even influence the gut microbiome. Airborne microbes may influence the gastrointestinal tract by triggering systemic immune pathways that modulate gut colonization. Because the gut microbiome plays a central role in training the immune system, these early exposures are critical for shaping the body's defenses. A recent study from Harvard has shown that the gut microbiome is tightly tied to the air we breathe. Work from Australia also prompts us to consider the volatile nutrients that are carried in air and the negative impacts of poor air quality on those nutrients, and thus on overall health.
Trillions in transit
By some estimates, at any given moment there are trillions of microbes swirling around us. While not all of them cause disease, it behooves us to have an effective agency that ensures the air we breathe is clean, and an agency that ensures healthcare is not hamstrung by politics. The sweeping legislative Big Buggy Bill that was just passed by the House and Senate is estimated to add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. Had it been an honest effort by our elected officials, we could have had a truly Big Beautiful Bill—one that preserved testable science, good governance, and public health instead of gutting them.
On a personal note, it was precisely the story of the invisible that drew me to study microbiology. My sister had a copy of Roger Stanier’s General Microbiology and I read the introduction describing how Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s and Louis Pasteur’s work had revealed the busy invisible world around us — how could I possibly ignore the wonders of it!