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 …
Several new papers about microbes and the built environment came out or came up in my searches this weekend, so time for another installment. Since one of the papers is about prison workers, you could play Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues while reading this post. Open Access: Coccidioides Exposure and Coccidioidomycosis among Prison Employees, California, United States – …
Nice to see the FDA digging around into this topic: FDA seeks more data on safety of hospital hand cleaners – The Washington Post. Clearly there is some major value in having people at hospitals (and other helath care facilities) wash their hands often – this is a key step in limiting the spread of pathogens. …
This week in eLife, our lab published a study entitled Gut bacteria are rarely shared by co-hospitalized premature infants, regardless of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) development. Spearheaded by a talented Banfield Lab post-doc, Tali Raveh-Sadka, in collaboration with Michael Morowitz’s Lab, the study aimed to find the causative agent in an outbreak of NEC cases that …
Just a quick post here pointing people to an article of possible interest: Healthcare-associated Infections Keep Industry On High Alert. In the article Sara Marberry discusses some issues relating to microbes and the built environment in hospital design. Among the topics covered are hydrogen peroxide vapor systems, UV irradiation devices, and copper as possible antimicrobials. Also …
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 …
We publish a newsletter every month here at microBEnet. And I thought it would be good to also publish to the blog the various summaries and roundups from the newsletter. Past newsletters are archived here. Here are some of the highlights from this latest newsletter. MicroBEnet Blogs A summary of the recent topics posted on microBE.net …
Guest Blog Post by Dr. Nick Clements, PhD Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Colorado Boulder, Miller Research Group In the event of a disaster, hospitals must have plans in place for receiving a surge of patients with a variety of possible infectious diseases or conditions. Pandemic-causing infectious diseases, such as the viruses that caused the SARS …
Personally, I find this article pretty disturbing: Iowa City VA patients not told about bacteria problem. Basically, the story is, that the bacterium that causes Legionnaires disease (Legionella pneumophila) has been found in the water system at a VA hospital in Iowa. And the managers of the hospital say “But they said they’ve been able to control the …
For anyone looking for another reason to fear hospitals, nosocomial infections (hospital acquired infections), or spinal injections, here is a story for you. Contaminated spinal injections were given to patients in 20 states and led to 751 individuals developing fungal meningitis and 64 deaths. FDA and CDC officials conducted a preliminary investigation and discovered a …