Episode 445 interviews Sarah Kwan, who is a Ph.D. candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Peccia Environmental Biotechnology Laboratory at Yale University. She also received her M.S and Ph.M. in Environmental Engineering from Yale. Recently, she has been conducting research investigating the correlation of indoor air pollution in homes and schools of the Cherokee Nation …
This is Karen Dannemiller’s talk on the nexus of housing characteristics, indoor microbial communities, and asthma severity. This was recorded at the MoBE 2017 symposium in Washington D.C. If you’re interested, check out all of the other speakers from MoBE 2017 on our YouTube channel!
Microbes on shoes Review: Shoe soles as a potential vector for pathogen transmission: A systematic review – Tasnuva Rashid – Journal of Applied Microbiology (OA) Shoe soles are possible vectors for infectious diseases. Although studies have been performed to assess the prevalence of infectious pathogens on shoe soles and decontamination techniques, no systematic review has …
So there is this new paper out in the New England Journal of Medicine: Innate Immunity and Asthma Risk in Amish and Hutterite Farm Children – NEJM It is quite interesting and is getting a bunch of press including Barnyard Dust Offers a Clue to Stopping Asthma in Children Amish kids help scientists understand why …
There is a recent review paper that may be of interest: Pediatric Asthma and the Indoor Microbial Environment | SpringerLink Abstract The global increase in the prevalence of asthma has been related to several risk factors; many of them linked to the “westernization” process and the characteristics of the indoor microbial environment during early life …
Here’s the report from Day 1 of the 5th annual Microbiology of the Built Environment meeting in Boulder, CO. Following my summary of the talks is a Storify of all the tweets from the day. The first talk of the day was by Ulla Haverinen-Shaughnessy from the University of Eastern Finland whose talk was entitled …
Two reviews came out recently by Mutius et al and Smits et al discussing the link between microbes and asthma. Sadly, they are not open access. Both reviews suggest that exposure to microbially rich environments helps build the immune response and inflammation systems. The Mutius et al paper drew from research conducted on urban environmental microbiology using DNA fingerprinting to characterize indoor …
Happy Valentine’s Day! Here is a new post expressing my love for everything microbial and built. Based on real science and yes, there is chocolate. The great indoors Indoor microbial communities: Influence on asthma severity in atopic and nonatopic children – Karen C. Dannemiller – The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology ($$) We sought …
For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …
Here are the papers on the built environment microbiology that I found in the past weeks. For more microbiology papers, please check out my daily blog MicrobiomeDigest. Copper surfaces are associated with significantly lower concentrations of bacteria on selected surfaces within a pediatric intensive care unit – Michael G. Schmidt – American Journal of Infection …
