There are a bunch of stories starting to come out based on some press and paper releases from the CDC yesterday. One that seems well done is this from CIDRAP: CDC notes progress, threat regarding hospital superbugs | CIDRAP. Today’s CDC report focused on the six most concerning antibiotic-resistant bacteria and found better progress against them …
Jonathan drew my attention to this paper on antibiotic susceptibility of 153 bacterial isolates collected from a hospital in Ethiopia. I thought the numerous grammatical errors in the paper would parallel with the quality of the study, but I was pleasantly disproved. In the abstract they state, “86.9% [of the 153 isolates] were resistant to …
A paper from Bertone et al studies indoor arthropod diversity in urban and suburban homes. They surveyed all the arthropods they could find in 50 homes in North Carolina, finding 24-128 distinct arthropod families per home! These critters were filtering in from the outdoor surroundings of the home, and most of them were benign to humans. They also found …
Here are some recent news and science articles on antibiotic resistance that I found this afternoon: Some not so happy stories – Intestinal microbiome is related to lifetime antibiotic use in Finnish pre-school children Antimicrobial resistance a challenge to public health: Nadda Some happy/cool stories – Audiocast: Developing new antimicrobial drugs and alternatives Bills would prohibit livestock …
Last week, a bunch of news articles came out (like this one) that talk about how we are on track to figuring out new ways to tackle antibiotic resistant superbugs. The research they are referring to highlights a paper recently published in Nature (a closed access journal) by Changjiang Dong’s group at the University of East …
This recent news article discusses a new candidate antimicrobial called Globomycin and the work that researchers at Trinity College Dublin have put in to map out its spatial organization. A particularly interesting point that is discussed is the idea of narrow-spectrum antibiotics. Antibiotic/antimicrobial resistance is driven in part by the fact that these drugs target a …
So as a general rule I don’t like to pick on published papers… mostly I prefer to pick on news stories, particularly of the germaphobic variety. That being said, occasionally I see a paper that just makes me think “why is that published?”. One of my interests is the topic of antimicrobials and antibiotic resistance …
Flu and cold season is upon us; it seems everywhere I go there is someone around me coughing or sniffling. In this post, I bring to you 3 survival stories of the bugs going around this winter, while also shedding light on two, often ignored issues brought about by this wonderful season. I’ll begin by …
mSphere, ASM’s new open access journal, published a paper recently called Antibiotic Resistance in Animal and Environmental Samples Associated with Small-Scale Poultry Farming in Northwestern Ecuador, written by Braykov et al. The abstract is as follows: The effects of animal agriculture on the spread of antibiotic resistance (AR) are cross-cutting and thus require a multidisciplinary perspective. …
Got notified of this paper by some automated Google Scholar searchers I have set up (this one for papers on microbial forensics) and I thought it would be of interest to some.: Source: Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology – Considerations for estimating microbial environmental data concentrations collected from a field setting By Erin E …