Bill Walsh of The Healthy Building Network has posted a story on the subject,”the Dirt on Antimicrobials” that covers the health effects concerns from the chemicals themselves but does not address the currently popular subject of the health harm or benefits from the presence of and exposures to the multitude of microbes in, on, and …
If you read this blog, you probably know a thing or two or more about antibiotic resistance. Especially in terms of how humans have aided in furthering it. This LA Times article reports that in mid-September, President Obama signed an executive order aiming to combat drug-resistant microbes. A 20 million dollar prize will be given …
N. b. Should it appear presumptuous, I was publicly prompted to write this. I loathe to link to the original post by Locwin, but must for my response to make sense. A recent blog post (Sept 22, 2014; accessed Sept 24, 2014) by Ben Locwin addresses in the title and first line a study in Nature (Suez …
The last full day of the Lake Arrowhead meeting was as awesome as the first two. It must have been incredible to watch microbial genomics evolve over the last 20 years that the meeting has existed… a time span that just covers the first ever bacterial genome to the 100’s or 1000’s of genomes that …
Another great day at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics meeting. The session titles today were “Metagenomics/Pathogens/Antibiotics/Evolution” and “Antibiotic Resistance”. As always, the best summary of the talks can be found in the Storify below. My random notes are here… these are just the things that struck me. Thanks to Surya Saha for the …
Researchers in Egypt did a fascinating study recently on probiotics for fish. They tested the effect of three different types of Psuedomonas fluorescens on two pathogens that affect tilapia in the Nile (P. angulliseptica and S. faecium). Their aim was to find a more eco-friendly way of controlling the pathogens in aquaculture compared to chemical antimicrobials. The probiotic was indeed …
There was a very interesting artilce in the New York Times on August 21 bu Michael Kimmelman: In Redesigned Room, Hospital Patients May Feel Better Already. The article focuses on a move by the University Medical Center of Princeton to redesign hospital rooms. And Kimmelman discusses a variety of issues associated with hospital design. And there were …
In the 2011 paper “Microbial Biogeography of Public Restroom Surfaces” Noah Fierer and others found that some of the toilet flush handles had similar microbial communities to those of the restroom floor, suggesting evidence of the germaphobic practice of flushing the toilet with a foot. I was curious to know if we could find other microbial …
Ah, the antibiotic resistance problem again. Yes, we know that antibiotic overuse-both in humans and in agriculture, contributes. This is not surprising. But how does our built environment contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance genes? The built environment is a perfect place for host and environmental microbes to collide and share gene, including antibiotic …
Have you ever said “I boiled a jar to disinfect it”? Well, you were wrong. You should have used “I boiled a jar to sanitize it”. Disinfectants refer to chemical substances used to kill microbes. Therefore, something has been disinfected only if a chemical was used. Heating or irradiating surfaces are methods of either sterilizing (free …