AIHA Mold Position Statement

Members of The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) do a lot of investigations of “problem buildings.” Mold has been a hot topic for more than a decade due to numerous lawsuits brought by occupants, tenants, and others against building owners. Large settlements have occurred, and famous plaintiffs and lawyers (Erin Brokavich) have been involved. Whole …

Building “science” blogs (?)

Many recent microbe.net post links to “blog of the day” provide diverse, interesting reading related to microbial ecology. To identify some worthwhile “building science” blogs, we contacted some of the most knowledgeable building scientists we know. The results suggest some observations comparing building science and microbial ecology. Both domains (“fields,” “disciplines”) are highly diversified, ranging …

Some building science questions about new study of NIH outbreak of Klebsiella

The publication of a paper “Tracking a Hospital Outbreak of Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae with Whole-Genome Sequencing” has drawn a lot of attention, presumably in large part because it occurred at an NIH facility. [http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/148/148ra116.full.html, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3004129] I work on the microBEnet project as a “building scientist” to help achieve the Sloan Foundation’s programs goals of …

Put a microbe on it: “The Great Indoors” session at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting

“Indoors” appeared as a session title for the first time at the annual meeting of the Ecology Society of America after Brendan Bohannan of the BioBE Center at the University of Oregon and Tom Bruns of BIMERC at the University of California organized a session entitled “The Great Indoors: Recent Advances in the Ecology of …