Are beards good for your health?

Hmm, maybe I'll have to grow a beard.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35350886
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In this study, published in the Journal of Hospital Infection, they swabbed the faces of 408 hospital staff with and without facial hair.
They had good reasons for doing so. We know that hospital-acquired infections are a major cause of disease and death in hospitals, with many patients acquiring an infection they didn't have when they went in. Hands, white coats, ties and equipment have all been blamed, but what about beards?

Well, the researchers were surprised to find that it was the clean-shaven staff, and not the beardies, who were more likely to be carrying something unpleasant on their faces.
The beardless group were more than three times as likely to be harbouring a species known as methicillin-resistant staph aureus on their freshly shaven cheeks. MRSA is a particularly common and troublesome source of hospital-acquired infections because it is resistant to so many of our current antibiotics.

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Far more interesting, in a few of the petri dishes he noticed that something was clearly killing the other bacteria. The most obvious suspect was a fellow microbe.

Adam indentified the silent assassins as part of a species called Staphylococcus epidermidis. When he tested them against a particularly drug-resistant form of Eschercichia coli (E. coli), the sort that cause urinary tract infections, they killed with abandon.
Purifying and properly testing a novel antibiotic is so expensive and has such a high failure rate that it is extremely unlikely doctors will be prescribing Beardicillin any time soon, but Adam is deadly serious about looking for replacements for our current stock of antibiotics.
As he pointed out, antibiotic-resistant infections kill at least 700,000 people a year, projected to rise to 10 million by 2050. There have been no new antibiotics released in the past 30 years.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35350886