Water Sanitation Issues in Developing Nations

Sanitation remains a problem in many developing countries across the globe. However, this issue goes much deeper than just delivering clean water to billions of people and treating sewage waste. The Conversation ran an article earlier this month on this topic. They bring up two important aspects of implementing water treatment programs in struggling countries. One …

Antibiotic Resistance in India

A recent news article from Times of India discusses the dire effects of antibiotic overuse on public health in India. Although we always discuss this problem in terms of what we see in the US, it’s important to realize that antibiotic resistance is a problem everywhere. According to the article, the top three antibiotic using …

Antimicrobial soap found to be essentially useless

A study appearing yesterday in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy by Min-Suk Rhee et al. found that while triclosan hand soap did kill bacterial after 9 hours, most people wash their hands for about twenty seconds and then rinse the soap off. In these circumstances, the antibacterial properties of the soap won’t do anything. Triclosan works …

Burger Bugs

I was clicking around news stories and found this Huffington Post article called “How Much Bacteria is In Your Burger?” Here’s what they report: “…every sample of ground beef collected by researchers from supermarkets around the country contained enterococcus and/or nontoxin-producing E. coli, which indicate fecal contamination. In other words, all the beef had poop …

Animal antibiotic stewardship workshop

In response to studies showing that antibiotic resistance can spread through the food supply, the FDA has made some recent policy decisions about the use of antibiotics in livestock rearing. A public meeting will be held by the FDA on September 30, 2015, from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Jefferson Auditorium, 14th and Independence …

Recent Built Environment Microbiology papers, July 20, 2015

I did not find a lot of recent papers on indoor microbiology, but quite a couple on the microbiology of drinking and wastewater, and some on ballast, pharmacy, and oil-platform water. Since this blog is all about water, I am playing The Waterboys – The Whole Of The Moon in the background. Free with registration: Acute Gastrointestinal Illness Risks …

Metagenomics of toilet waste from long distance flights

I just saw this paper, published a couple of days ago in Nature’s Scientific Reports. And yeah, it’s open access! While reading this post, I would suggest playing Dalai Lama by Rammstein, the in-flight version of Der Erlkönig. Meta-genomic analysis of toilet waste from long distance flights; a step towards global surveillance of infectious diseases and antimicrobial …

Antibiotic Alternatives

We write a fair bit about antibiotic resistance on this blog, but seldom about the alternatives. Obviously, medicine shouldn’t avoid using antibiotics altogether, but we do need better management and use of our current anti-microbial compounds. We also need new methods of treating infection. Nature News has a brief but informative list of antibiotic alternatives written by …

The Hysteria about Listeria: Thoughts on Food in the Built Environment

About a month ago, listeria found in Sabra Hummus caused a massive food safety recall across the US. So I got to thinking — how common are pathogens in the food we eat and how is this addressed on industrial scales? Food is processed, transported, and eaten in our built environments multiple times a day, …

Recent Paper Shed’s Light on Effect of Using Antibiotics While Traveling

When I jetted off to South America a year and a half ago, my doctor sent me with a bottle of Ciprofloxacin in case of an unfortunate bout of food poisoning. I thought little of it then, but what does it mean when millions of travelers head to developing countries with antibiotics? You guessed it …