The Sloan Program in the Microbiology of the Built Environment awarded a few new grants this spring. The first of these was to Kyle Bibby at the University of Pittsburgh called “Microbial Ecology Dynamics of Hospital Premise Plumbing Following the Introduction of an On-Site Monochloramine Disinfection System”. The project is being conducted in collaboration with …
Does heavy drinking affect the bacteria in your living room air? I don’t know, but some work I saw at ASM suggests that it might. At the poster session on Day 3, Valdis Krumins from Rutgers had a poster reporting efforts to understand the effect on airborne bacterial concentrations (or, at least, their ribosomal 16S …
Just kidding; I paid to get in, but this conference is not intended for a research architect/building scientist like me. This was my third ASM meeting, and now I know something approaching 1% of the jargon, so I was able to “mine” the sessions, especially the posters, for built-environment-relevant content. Under the surface of the …
Seems like Legionella has been in the news a lot recently, with more and more outbreaks occurring (see recent posts here, here, here, and here). One of the largest outbreaks was in the VA hospital in Pittsburgh which got a lot of press because it occurred over a entire year and there have been numerous …
Not 100% sure what the main reason for this story is but I guess it is useful: Legionella Not Just Found In Hospitals, Some Homes Infected « CBS Pittsburgh. In my discussions with people about Legionella there is definitely an opinion out there that it is something that happens in big buildings – offices and hospitals …
[edited from the ASHRAE press release] Changes to clarify requirements in a proposed standard are open for public comment. The proposed ASHRAE standard, 188P, Prevention of Legionellosis Associated with Building Water Systems, specifies what must be done to control the spread of legionellosis. The standard helps facility managers/owners understand how to apply the available information …
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 …
We’ve posted in the past about various Legionella outbreaks including the one in Chicago, the one in Edinborough, and of course the one in the Playboy Mansion. For some reason we didn’t talk about the recent lethal outbreak in Quebec. You can read about it here. The latest update is that the source of Legionella …
Quick update: A few days ago I wrote about a Legionnaires outbreak in Chicago at the Marrioott hotel: Time for hotels to start surveying their microbes. CNN is reporting that the hotel has identified a putative source for the Legionella bacterium that causes Legionnaires: the fountain in the lobby and/or a spa: Chicago hotel shuts fountain, …
Well, investigations of Legionella outbreaks always seem to involve a combination of microbiology and building science so I thought I would post this link here: BBC News – Edinburgh Legionnaires’ outbreak: Cooling towers ‘likely’ source. I wonder how much Legionella is showing up in other buildings – especially in DNA based surveys – even when people …