When I first saw this headline: Fox 25 Investigates: Hidden hospital germs I geared up for YASS – yet another swab story (this is a bit of a play on the “swab story” complaint Mark Martin uses for stories that report on microbes found by swabbing. Nooooooooooo- there are bacteria in our homes —- run run run — aaarrgg …
Well, there is clearly some germophobia behind all of the coverage for this new study published in the Journal of Hospital Infection: Microbiological comparison of hand-drying methods: the potential for contamination of the environment, user, and bystander. by E.L. Best, P. Parnell, M.H. Wilcox. I have pasted their abstract below: Aim To compare the propensity of three …
This meeting seems like it may be of interest to many in the microBEnet community: Building Health Initiative. It is not clear if there will be much there specifically about microbes but there are many topics that clearly could be connected to microbes in various ways. So this might be worth checking out.
I wrote this for the Google Scholar blog where it was posted recently.  I am reposting it here becuase I thought it might be of interest to the microBEnet audience.
For many years I have been worried about how space travel will affect microbiomes – of the space vehicles and of the residents (people, other animals, plants, etc). This is one of the reasons we started Project MERCCURI and get involved in looking at the microbes on the International Space Station. It is also why …
We publish a newsletter every month here at microBEnet. And I thought it would be good to also publish to the blog the various summaries and roundups from the newsletter. Past newsletters are archived here. Here are some of the highlights from this latest newsletter. MicroBEnet Blogs A summary of the recent topics posted on microBE.net …
There is a new genome paper out that should be of interest to many thinking about the built environment, microbes and allergens and related topics: The draft genome, transcriptome, and microbiome of Dermatophagoides farinae reveal a broad spectrum of dust mite allergens. Published as an open access paper (yay) in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology …
It seems that any time a holiday comes around in the US, the press starts to ramp up the writing of stories about evil microbes that are lurking all around us. And Halloween appears to be no exception. I am now planning on referring to this attitude as “microbophobia” rather than “germophobia” because to some …
This is a guest post from Nicholas Osborne from the University of Exeter Medical School. I saw a paper of his that seemed very relevant to microBE.net “Indoor fungal diversity and asthma: A meta-analysis and systematic review of risk factors.” (by Sharpe RA, Bearman N, Thornton CR, Husk K1, Osborne NJ). And so I wrote to …
So – we are hoping to hire an artist to do some contract work for “Gut Check” the microbiome game. And we need some help and advice. We would like the game and all the art associated it to be released under as broad an open license as possible. But we would also like to …