Just a quick post here about the spreading of C. difficile among patients who visited healthcare settings but didn’t take antiobiotics. Traditionally C. difficile is thought to infect people whose normal microbiota was disturbed by antibiotics. It’s also the target of most experiments on fecal transplants since those have been shown to be very effective …
I generally try to avoid any type of discussion of the age of researchers and I also generally never ask people about their age. But this time it is in a story so I think it is OK to mention: Jack Gilbert of Argonne National Laboratory is on Crain’s Chicago 40 Under 40 2014 list. This …
Just a quick post here on an NPR story that caught my attention “Giving Chickens Bacteria … To Keep Them Antibiotic-Free”. Unlike with humans where determining the effect of probiotics is complicated by a lot of variation in the population (genetic, cultural, diet, etc.), with a whole bunch of chickens it’s easier to measure the …
Heard this story on NPR yesterday: ‘A Universe Beneath Our Feet’: Life In Beijing’s Underground : NPR. It discusses the growing trend in Beijing for people to be living in apartments / basements comlpetely underground. This is happening for multiple reasons and it clearly has some potential big consequences. It does seem like a possible …
Just a quick post here. Found this news story (from Nov 18) doing some Google Searchers: UO student gets EPA grant to study health link between plants, people – Portland Business Journal. It discusses a new grant on “Relationships Among Airborne Microbial Communities, Urban Land Uses and Vegetation Cover: Implications for Urban Planning and Human Health.” …
Every day, diverse microbial communities with cell levels of 106-108 cells/liter migrate from drinking water treatment plants through a complex network of pipes in drinking water distribution systems and into our built environment. Managing this mass migration is critical from multiple perspectives. Some of these microorganisms can make consumers ill, some can contribute to pipe …
So – just was reading this paper: Healthcare Workers’ Hand Microbiome May Mediate Carriage of Hospital Pathogens. Basically, they showed that the microbiome on health care worker’s hands was correlated with estimates of pathogen carriage. And, it seems to be of potential interest to the microBEnet community. I confess, I am skeptical of the validity of some …
I am starting to think a lot about the connections between architecture and microbiology – in part in preparation for the American Institute for Architects Annual Meeting in Atlanta May 14-16 where I will be participating in sessions on “microbes in the built environment” The tentative details for the sessions are Session: Microbes in the Built Environment: Perspectives …
Well, I am no lawyer but this certainly seems interesting from a microbial point of view: Court’s Reasoning That “Bacteria” Is Not A “Pollutant” Favorable For Policyholders In Other Cases – Insurance – United States. From the article: That court found that “under Louisiana law, Legionella and Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria” — the bacteria which cause Legionnaire’s …
When I first saw this headline: Fox 25 Investigates: Hidden hospital germs I geared up for YASS – yet another swab story (this is a bit of a play on the “swab story” complaint Mark Martin uses for stories that report on microbes found by swabbing. Nooooooooooo- there are bacteria in our homes —- run run run — aaarrgg …