Are ‘germ-zapping’ robots useful in fighting hospital acquired infections?

Well, I confess, I am still a bit skeptical of the utility of the “germ fighting robots” of various kinds that keep getting promoted as being useful at various health care facilities. There was a story published today in our local major paper – the Sacramento Bee that discusses this topic. Germs that cause hospital-acquired infections …

The microbiomes of built environments when the builder is not human

Here at microBEnet we have been trying to help build up the field of “microbiology of the built environment.” Understandably, a lot of the focus of this field has been on human built environments and humans in such built environments. I (and clearly many others) believe that we can learn a lot by expanding this to …

Job: antibiotic resistance in 100k TB genomes

Hi All I’d just like to highlight a job we are advertising, to lead the bioinformatic (sequence+variation) analysis of 100,000 M tuberculosis genomes which we are sequencing (WGS), ~50,000 of which will be phenotyped for 12 drugs, and the remainder for some subset. Note the deadline is very soon – Monday 6th March! This project …

A sinking feeling: misleading headline but interesting paper on tracking spread of microbes in sinks

There is an interesting new paper out of interest.  I found out about this through Twitter Study reports multidrug resistant #bacteria found in #hospital sinks – New research in @ASMicrobiology‘s #AEM https://t.co/0i7GKoPmUE pic.twitter.com/ZM9gAavL2t — ASM Newsroom (@ASMnewsroom) February 24, 2017   Now this caught my attention because it seemed to be about, well, multidrug resistant …

Investigating the antibiotic resistome of rural and peri-urban Latin America

For many years, efforts to profile the antibiotic resistome of the human gut focused exclusively on two extremes of human society: Western, industrialized cities and remote hunter-gatherers. While these studies were undoubtedly important, they overlooked the majority of the world’s population, which exists somewhere between the two extremes. Indeed, three-quarters of the world’s population lives …