Master’s Thesis of Possible Interest: role of hospital toilets in microbial dissemination & the effectiveness of UV C 

Just got notified of this via some automated Google Scholar searchers and it seems like it might be of interest: Source: The role of hospital toilets in microbial dissemination and the effectiveness of ultraviolet C irradiation – UBC Library Open Collections Master’s thesis by Jesse Cooper from UBC.   See some discussion of this on …

Are ‘germ-zapping’ robots useful in fighting hospital acquired infections?

Well, I confess, I am still a bit skeptical of the utility of the “germ fighting robots” of various kinds that keep getting promoted as being useful at various health care facilities. There was a story published today in our local major paper – the Sacramento Bee that discusses this topic. Germs that cause hospital-acquired infections …

Antibiotic Resistance in the News

Here are some recent news and science articles on antibiotic resistance that I found this afternoon: Some not so happy stories – Intestinal microbiome is related to lifetime antibiotic use in Finnish pre-school children Antimicrobial resistance a challenge to public health: Nadda Some happy/cool stories – Audiocast: Developing new antimicrobial drugs and alternatives Bills would prohibit livestock …

Federal Trade Commission Penalizes False Sanitation Claims

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is finally cracking down on products that tap into the neurotic tendencies of extreme germophobes. In this recent Consumerist article, Chris Morran discusses the penalties Zadro Health Solutions and Angel Sales had to pay for false advertising of their disinfection products. Without a single lab experiment, we can already deduce …

Acquired Resistance to Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation

By Amanda Makowiecki Miller Research Group University of Colorado, Boulder With drug resistant bacteria becoming a growing problem, alternative methods are being pursued to decontaminate air and surfaces; ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) is one of these methods. UVGI uses short wavelength light in order to disrupt the genetic material of microorganisms, this disruption either kills …

Editorial by Nazaroff on “Illumination, lighting technologies, and indoor environmental quality”

Definitely worth checking this out: Illumination, lighting technologies, and indoor environmental quality – Nazaroff – 2014 – Indoor Air – Wiley Online Library.  It is an editorial for Indoor Air and has many interesting bits.  Of particilar interest to me and microBEnet is the part about how lighting affects the microbiology of indoor spaces and also …

Cell phone sterilizer? Really?

So earlier this week I wrote an article at Slate called “I would rather lick a toilet seat than cell phone”.  Which was a really unfortunate title since I was trying to emphasize that toilet seats are surprisingly clean and the general point of the article was about microbial scare stories.  I did not mean …