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 …
This really made my day / week / month. Marc Edwards has been selected as one of Fortune Magazine’s “World’s Greatest Leaders”. Source: Marc Edwards Here’s what they wrote about him Edwards, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, is one of the nation’s top experts on water contamination–and nowhere has his impact been bigger than in …
There is a new paper in AEM of interest: Characterization of biofilms developing on hospital shower hoses and implications for nosocomial infections by Maria J. Soto-Giron, Luis M. Rodriguez, Chengwei Luob, Michael Elkd, Hodon Ryu, Jill Hoelle, Jorge W. Santo Domingo and Konstantinos T. Konstantinidis They used 16S rRNA gene sequencing of cultured isolates, and metagenomic sequencing, to characterize the microbes living in hospital shower hoses. …
The Los Angeles Times posted an article yesterday on “Deadly superbugs from hospitals get stronger in the sewers and could end up in the Pacific Ocean”. While there is some truth to the matter, it is necessary to approach it with some skepticism. It is well known that antibiotic resistant bacteria are extremely prevalent in …
Hello Microbe.net readers, I am Fangqiong. I recently received the Microbiology of the Built Environment Postdoc Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. I will be studying a kind of built environment microbiome, the microbiome in the urban water cycle, in Professor Eric Alm’s lab at MIT. I am very grateful to the Sloan Foundation …
As communities grow and pump more groundwater, radium from deep bedrock is contaminating dozens of water systems. The city of Waukesha wants to tap into Lake Michigan to solve its radium problem. Just was pointed to this piece by Deborah Blum: As wells go deeper, radium levels rise in state tap water | WisconsinWatch.org. It …