Well, if true this is both troubling and not surprising: Bacteria becoming resistant to hospital disinfectants, warn scientists | Society | The Guardian The story reports on a paper in Science Translational Medicine. Some quotes: The results reveal that Enterococcus faecium bacteria have become more tolerant to alcohol over that time. “We found that the new …
This new open access paper from Li et al may be of interest. Global Survey of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Air. Abstract: Despite its emerging significant public health concern, the presence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in urban air has not received significant attention. Here, we profiled relative abundances (as a fraction, normalized by 16S rRNA …
Backyard chicken coops are on the rise and in many ways that is a good thing. However, one negative with this is that some chickens can carry various microbes that can make people sick and sometimes those microbes get to people and make them sick. CNN has a new story on the topic that may …
I recently spent a weekend visiting a friend out of state and quickly came to realize that he rarely washed his hands. Before eating? No. After the gym? No. Even after going to the bathroom…and not just urination. No washing! I was disgusted and could not convince him of the same. How could an educated …
Fascinating, scary and really important read from Maryn McKenna in Wired: The Strange and Curious Case of the Deadly Superbug Yeast By the normal standards of outbreak, Candida auris signals a mind-bending shift—and it’s forcing researchers draw on some of medicine’s oldest practices to rethink treatment. The article tells the tale of Candida auris a fungus that …
This new #OpenAccess paper may be of interest to those out there thinking about microbes in the built environment. : Luhung I, Wu Y, Xu S, Yamamoto N, Wei-Chung Chang V, Nazaroff WW (2018) Exploring temporal patterns of bacterial and fungal DNA accumulation on a ventilation system filter for a Singapore university library. PLoS ONE …
(This is a guest blog post, written by Madhan Tirumalai and George Fox, authors of the publication) Comparative genomics help identify novel genes of radiation resistant spore producing Bacillus sp. from Spacecraft assembly facilities Madhan R Tirumalai and George E. Fox Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Houston, Houston, USA. The …
News story about the fascinating and important new project on chemistry of the home. This is being supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in their new Chemistry of the Built Environment program. Dozens of analytical instruments have spent a month observing the chemistry of the air inside a three bed house Source: Large scale …
So Indoor Air 2018 is fast approaching (June 22-27th) and there are a large number of MoBE-relevant talks on the menu. The preliminary program for the entire conference can be found here. Paula Olsiewski from the Sloan Foundation sent us a list this morning of the talks relevant to the Sloan funded microbiology of the …
NIH/NIAID is seeking comments on their recently released Tuberculosis Strategic Command. See: NIAID Tuberculosis Strategic Plan Request for Information (RFI) I have copied the announcement from the release below: ——————————————— NIAID Tuberculosis Strategic Plan Request for Information (RFI) Purpose This Notice is a time-sensitive Request for Information (RFI) inviting comments and suggestions on the framework …