Wow – this is disturbing: VA under scrutiny after Legionnaires’ cases in Pittsburgh – CNN.com. Seems that there has been an outbreak of Legionnaires’ at the VA hospital in Pittsburgh and apparently the hospital officials new knew about problems for a year but did not reveal this. For more on this see Doyle, Casey seek investigations …
One the one hand this story represents an important set of findings: Hospital Rooms Can Be Bacteria Reservoirs : Personal Liberty Digestâ„¢. Main point: Hospital rooms are not getting to be germ free after cleaning. And in this case they focused on rooms where the recently discharged patient had a history of infection with multidrug resistant …
Second in our series of “People Behind the Science” is Jack Gilbert from the University of Chicago, a new (and previous) Sloan grantee in the microbiology of the built environment program. Here Dr. Gilbert talks about his interest in the field and his new study looking at hospitals. Transcript below:
I recently posted here about one of the new Sloan-funded projects in the microbiology of the built environment, the “Hospital Microbiome Project”. One thing I didn’t mention is that they already have some interesting preliminary results from the construction phase of the project that are worth checking out. Jack Gilbert has also been involved in …
The second new project to receive funding from the Sloan foundation is a project entitled “Analysis of the ICU room environment as a source of microorganisms colonizing the GI tract of premature infants”. This project is being managed by Jill Banfield at UC Berkeley, along with her Co-PIs; Michael Morowitz (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine) …
The Sloan Foundation has just announced funding for another two projects, we’ll be posting details here. The first project is called the “Hospital Microbiome Study” and will be managed by Jack Gilbert (University of Chicago) and Captain Benjamin Kirkup at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Check out the project website here.
Heard about an interesting paper today (sadly not open access) describing airflow simulations in an aerosol chamber. Basically they showed that if you release bugs from a mannequin, they spread all over the room… up to 3.5 meters away. A worthwhile study, but not something that wasn’t known already. What made this get so much …
Quick post here about a study that came out last month “Exploring Bacterial Diversity in Hospital Environments by GS-FLX Titanium Pyrosequencing” by Poza et al in Madrid. These authors used 454 sequencing of 16S to survey bacterial populations in the entrance hall and the ICU of a hospital in Madrid. Not surprisingly, they found lower …
Last night was the Microbiology of the Built Environment session at the bi-annual Lake Arrowhead meeting. This session was organized and sponsored by microBEnet. I recorded some of the talks and will post those videos here after some editing. Here’s a summary of the speakers and the topics discussed. The first speaker was James Meadow …
Ugg – not impressed by this press release from Clark Seif Clark: Healthcare Facilities need to be Aware of Microbial Pathogens. This release has some accurate points such as that people with compromised immune systems need to worry about pathogens in the world around the. And that people with compromised systems can be harmed by breathing …