Beyond recent posts about Legionella, we don’t talk a lot about the built environment of municipal water systems, although Norm Pace and his group at CU Boulder have done extensive work on the topic in recent years. Therefore I thought I’d better point to this study, published a couple of weeks ago in Environmental Health …
CBC Radio has a podcast on the “hotel microbe” story that was all the buzz at the #ASM2012 meeting last week: Hotel Rooms and Bacteria. I note – I was interviewed by Michael about this but am traveling and have not been able to listen to the podcast as of yet so listen at your own …
Well, investigations of Legionella outbreaks always seem to involve a combination of microbiology and building science so I thought I would post this link here: BBC News – Edinburgh Legionnaires’ outbreak: Cooling towers ‘likely’ source. I wonder how much Legionella is showing up in other buildings – especially in DNA based surveys – even when people …
Of possible interest to readers here. On my Tree of Life blog I have been compiling a list of microbiology focused blogs: The Tree of Life: Collecting links to blogs that focus entirely or partly on microbiology topics #ASM2012. We will be adding these to the microbiology blogroll here soon.
(This is a guest post by David Thaler, who is one of the Sloan-funded investigators working on the microbiology of the built environment. The goal is to spark substantive discussion, so please comment below!) A few thoughts after the Inaugural meeting of Microbiology of the Built Environment Boulder My own opinions on these points are …
As a microbiologist learning a little bit about building science, I was fascinated to hear early on about how little was actually known about the causative effect of particular microbes on human health in the built environment. I had assumed that we knew a lot about which species of fungi (mold) and bacteria caused problems …
Very useful review paper came out this week discussing the microbiology of asthma. Thanks to David Thaler for pointing this one out. The review discusses the role of microbes in both the development and prevention of asthma. While not explicitly concerned with the built environment, the “hygiene hypothesis” has obvious implications for the indoor microbiome.
The session at the ASM 2012 meeting on “The Great Indoors” seems to have gone well. I will be writing up a more detailed report but here is a quick summary done via “Storify”. ———————– UPDATE February 2019 Storify is no longer in existence. Fortunately we were able to convert the Storify summary …
Interesting video from ASM Live about a project sampling for microbes in hotel rooms. Featuring Katie Kirsch from the University of Houston and Jonathan Eisen from UC Davis.
The American Society for Microbiology meeting is starting tomorrow and there are multiple things related to microbiology of the built environment there. These include a session that was organized by Brendan Bohannan which I am chairing. The detail of the session are below: Session Title: The Great Indoors: Recent Advances in the Ecology of Built Environments …