New paper of interest on Hospital Plumbing and Carbapenem Resistance

New paper of interest:: Genomic Analysis of Hospital Plumbing Reveals Diverse Reservoir of Bacterial Plasmids Conferring Carbapenem Resistance Weingarten RA, Johnson RC, Conlan S, Ramsburg AM, Dekker JP, Lau AF, Khil P, Odom RT, Deming C, Park M, Thomas PJ, NISC Comparative Sequencing Program, Henderson DK, Palmore TN, Segre JA, Frank KM. 2018. Genomic analysis …

Paper of interest: antibiotic resistance and the safety of reusing treated wastewater

Paper of possible interest: Hong, P.-Y.; Julian, T.R.; Pype, M.-L.; Jiang, S.C.; Nelson, K.L.; Graham, D.; Pruden, A.; Manaia, C.M. Reusing Treated Wastewater: Consideration of the Safety Aspects Associated with Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria and Antibiotic Resistance Genes. Water 2018, 10, 244. Abstract: As more countries engage in water reuse, either intended or de facto, there is …

Has “The antibiotic course” had its day? Some say yes, some say no or not yet 

“Should we always antibiotics until the end of their course?” Well, this has been a question asked on and off over the last 10 years or so.  And this I was quite interested in a Tweet I saw from Eric Topol this AM (I note – Eric Topol on Twitter is a better source of …

Storify of Talk by Jo Handelsman at DOE JGI Meeting on Plant Secondary Metabolites

This may be of interest to some. I made a Storify of some Tweets by me and a few others from a talk by Jo Handelsman yesterday. ———————– UPDATE December 2018 Storify is no longer in existence. Fortunately we were able to convert the Storify summary to one via Wakelet. Wakelet details Link to the …

Great article by Maryn McKenna on the hunt for new antibiotics w/ crowdsourcing help

This is definitely worth a read: Source: Could the Answer to the Antibiotic-Resistance Crisis Be Found on a Toilet Seat? – The Atlantic Or a listen to since there is an audio version of the story (see below).\ The article basically discusses work by Adam Roberts to survey the world for new antibiotics.  The best …

Ants as (Possible) Vectors of Bacteria in Hospital Environments

Not really sure what to think about this article:  Ants as Vectors of Bacteria in Hospital Environments. Published in the Journal of Microbiology Research and authored by Bruna Rafaela Machado Oliveira, Luciano Ferreira de Sousa, Raquel Chalá Soares, Thiago César Nascimento, Marcelo Silva Madureira, Jorge Luiz Fortuna. In a quick scan the science seems reasonable. …

Antibacterial Soaps Still Terrible

This article by Beth Mole is a fairly detailed summary of recent research on the effects of antimicrobial soaps. As we have mentioned before on microBEnet, antimicrobials increase resistance in the environment, wildlife, and people. In addition, the soaps are often not used for long enough to confer a benefit. The article particularly focuses on triclosan and triclocarban, …

A New Way to Fight Superbugs?

There are a few news articles that have been coming out (like this one) that draw attention to this recently published paper in ISME Journal, entitled “Iron availability shapes the evolution of bacteriocin resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.” The big picture of the paper was to study how resistance evolves and to explore the effectiveness of …

Hospital acquired infections – the good news and the super news (but not super in a good way) 

There are a bunch of stories starting to come out based on some press and paper releases from the CDC yesterday. One that seems well done is this from CIDRAP: CDC notes progress, threat regarding hospital superbugs | CIDRAP. Today’s CDC report focused on the six most concerning antibiotic-resistant bacteria and found better progress against them …