BATON ROUGE — New research has uncovered some little-known viruses that live on things most people use daily, but they may prove to be beneficial.

Damp and warm places are the perfect environment for microbes, meaning showerheads and toothbrushes could be potential breeding grounds for these viruses.

“It's unsurprising that we find them there because we find a bunch of bacteria basically everywhere, everywhere. But what was surprising is how many different viruses we found and how different they looked from anything that we had ever seen before,” microbiologist Erica Hartmann said.

Hartmann led a study which found something called "bacteriophage" all over these two environments. While the name is alarming, Hartmann says that these viruses don’t make people sick but instead infect bacteria.

The newfound information could potentially save lives.

“For a long time, we've relied on antibiotics to be able to treat infections and save lives. but right now, antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest public health challenges that we're facing globally,” Hartmann said, “and so there's a lot of hope that we can leverage things like bacteria phage to help treat these infections that we can no longer treat with antibiotic drugs."

Hartmann says the hope is that these phages will aid in the development of better drugs or improved biotechnologies.

"We need microbes to in our gut, help us digest our food on our skin, help us to ward off pathogens. and it's actually a really good thing that we are exposed to microbes from time to time,” Hartmann said.