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 …
Today, humans spend ~90% of their lives roaming the ‘great indoors’, which is very different from the outdoor environments where we co-evolved with our commensal microbiota (Kelley and Gilbert, 2013). We are just beginning to understand how the design of built environments (BEs) influences our microbiome, and how these interactions, in turn, might affect human …
A new volume of Studies in Mycology was published recently and is dedicated to the diversity in the fungal genera Aspergillus, Penicillium and Talaromyces, all of which play a significant role indoors. The issue includes 6 papers related to our Indoor Mycota Barcode of Life (IM-BOL) project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program …
To all of the microbial researchers out there, be careful about contaminants in your cultures, reagents, and equipment! Yes, we all are careful about good techniques and having proper controls. However, this article suggested that perhaps contaminants are surfacing much more in microbial related literature than we thought. This concept isn’t new, and the aforementioned …
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’ve posted in the past about Baudoinia, also known as the Kentucky whiskey fungus that grows on buildings near distilleries. See our previous posts here and here. This fungus was named and characterized by James Scott from the University of Toronto. Once people affected by the fungus could pin it on the distilleries, the lawsuits …
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 …
A UC Riverside child development center building will be closed for several months in order to clean up mold contamination. Air and surface testing will be performed to certify the building as safe after remediation efforts are completed, but the presumed cause of this is a leaking water source within the walls. Sustained wetting of …
Harper Adams University in the UK recently posted a news article describing some intriguing work being done by Senior Lecturer Frank Vriesekoop, who has been investigating, among a slew of other interesting topics, whether banknotes can transfer bacteria, including pathogens. The original paper (unfortunately, not Open Access) in which his work was reported can be found here. …
If you read this blog, you probably know a thing or two or more about antibiotic resistance. Especially in terms of how humans have aided in furthering it. This LA Times article reports that in mid-September, President Obama signed an executive order aiming to combat drug-resistant microbes. A 20 million dollar prize will be given …