Just a short post about a news story recently where they have traced Pseudomonas found in NICU infants to the pipes in the building. It’s still in the early stages of the investigation… but it makes me wonder why routine surveillance isn’t more common. I feel like we often hear stories about finding Legionella, Pseudomonas, …
The Flint Water Crisis garnered national and international media coverage of elevated levels of lead in the water delivered to consumers’ taps. When the city of Flint began using the Flint River as its drinking water source without the addition of a corrosion inhibitor beginning in April 2014, the corrosive new water began to leach …
Rob Dunn is one of the true pioneers of Citizen Science and in Citizen Science projects involving microbes. And here is another fascinating project from Dunn and colleagues. The Wild Life of Showerheads Photo by Lea Shell- Rob Dunn Lab When Anton Von Leeuwenhoek, the first microbiologist, began to study microscopic life, he did so …
Got pointed to this by Ameet Pinto on Twitter and it seems likely of interest @microBEnet folks – this seems very relevant. cc @phylogenomics @davidacoil https://t.co/XWsIrRMOUi – Ameet Pinto (@watermicrobe) July 15, 2016 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js From the site: The Microbiome and the Environment Microorganisms are Earth’s oldest life forms and have come to inhabit virtually every …
Microbes and the built environment sensu stricto This short review in Trends in Microbiology is open access, very relevant for this blog, and received quite some press. Review: Buildings, Beneficial Microbes, and Health – Jordan Peccia, Sarah E. Kwan – Trends in Microbiology (OA) Bacteria and fungi in buildings exert an influence on the human …
A recent Slate article by Jonathan Katz talks about a map that is displayed at the CDC – as well as the heavy implications of this map. Despite genomic evidence that the UN peacekeepers were the source of cholera in earthquake-devastated Haiti, the CDC and the UN continue to avoid accountability. UN peacekeepers from Nepal failed to set up …
Ok I saw this Tweet and I thought it sounded cool: Autonomous Sewer Robots Live-Stream Neighborhood Microbiome Data – Nickolaus Hines https://t.co/fr8Xfs8XxQ pic.twitter.com/e5mDTGU44Y – Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) May 5, 2016 And definitely worth looking into in more detail. And, well, after looking I still think it is cool but not quite what the headline suggests. …
Legionellosis has emerged as a major public health threat related to the built environment, and outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease in New York City and Flint, Michigan in 2015 have drawn increased attention to the problem. Cases reported to CDC have increased more than four-fold since 2000 with over 5000 cases reported in 2015; almost all …
Sloan has just renewed our funding to build on our foundational research at Virginia Tech that has established general factors broadly shaping the composition of the premise plumbing microbiome! In this next phase we will focus on shifts in water chemistry and temperature, using brain-eating amoebae as a key exemplar (need to protect those brains!). …
Guest post by Melina Bautista (@qmbautista) and Ameet J. Pinto (@watermicrobe). The provision of safe drinking water relies primarily on disinfection as a cornerstone for pathogen control. Since its full-scale implementation in the early 20th century, it has become the standard final treatment step to inactivate microorganisms in most drinking water treatment plants around …