Well, normally I would not want to write about things going on at the Playboy Mansion here, or really anywhere. But this story about a Legionella outbreak seems to have legs (or maybe, flagella). The LA Times has another article about this outbreak discussing in more detail how social media was used to help track …
Just a quick post here – there is more detail on the recent JHU study on bacteria in faucets. Electronic faucets hinder, not help, hospital infection control | Johns Hopkins University – The Gazette.
Not yet published but this study could be of interest: Hands-free faucets harbor germs, Johns Hopkins study says – Los Angeles Times. . Not that surprising mind you but many people do assume that hands free faucets are clean.
DNA sequencing technology, a key tool in characterizing microbes in the environment, just keeps getting cheaper and easier. Right now there are some really nice technologies out there in machines from Illumina/Solexa, Roche/454 and ABI. And coming on the horizon are some new systems that possibly will be either “better” in some way or allow …
Just a quick post here about an upcoming conference of note: Applied Bioinformatics & Public Health Microbiology 2011, 1—3 June 2011 Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.( see WT Scientific conferences) for more.
Many news sources are reporting on a new study regarding levels of Staphylococcus in meat: (e.g., see Bacteria seen in nearly half of U.S. meat – CNN.com, Study Warns of Tainted Meat, and Almost half of meat in stores may have drug-resistant bacteria). The study, by Lance Price, Paul Keim, and colleagues from TGen reports that …
There is an excellent collection of tools and protocols for various microbiome analyses (genomics, metagenomics, rRNA) available at the Human Microbiome Project DACC site. This includes downloadable tools, links to online web servers, and PDFs of various protocols. Definitely worth checking out if you need some tools for sequence analysis.
The New York Times from yesterday has an editorial discussing hospital acquired infections: Hospitals Shouldn’t Make You Sicker – NYTimes.com. They discuss some new studies in the New England Journal of Medicine as well as some efforts by the Obama Administration. While there is a lot of research on hospital acquired infections, one thing the Times …
Well, we posted about this story before – Legionella bacteria popped up at a party at the playboy mansion in February. And now apparently the source of the Legionella bacteria has been traced to … hot tubs (see Playboy Mansion illness traced to hot tub bacteria – Yahoo! News). Also of note – the epidemiologists used …
For those interested in anything to do with microbiology of the built environment, we have created a citeulike group on this topic. If you are not familiar with citeulike, it is in essence a social reference management system where people can share and organize references (and even papers on top of the references in some …