Antibiotic Resistance in the News

Here are some recent news and science articles on antibiotic resistance that I found this afternoon: Some not so happy stories – Intestinal microbiome is related to lifetime antibiotic use in Finnish pre-school children Antimicrobial resistance a challenge to public health: Nadda Some happy/cool stories – Audiocast: Developing new antimicrobial drugs and alternatives Bills would prohibit livestock …

A cloud of cloud things for detecting clouds

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 …

Temporary Isolation Rooms and their Application to Hospital Surge Capacity for Infection Control

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 …

The antibiotics that could kill you

“In 2010, Americans were prescribed 258 million courses of antibiotics, a rate of 833 per thousand people. Such massive usage, billions of doses, has been going on year after year.” or so says Martin Blaser who has written a book (“Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues” published by Macmillan …

Harvard Magazine covers Sloan grantee Curtis Huttenhower’s research: microbes in transportation systems

In November, 2012, Curtis Huttenhower began work (with funding from the Sloan Foundation) to examine the transmission of human-associated microbes by public transportation surfaces. An article on “Big Data” in the current issue of Harvard Magazine includes a description of Huttenhower’s work in the lead article “Why “Big Data” Is a Big Deal.” After very …

“Black death was not spread by rat fleas, say researchers”

Yersinia pestis, Direct Fluorescent Antibody Stain (DFA), 200x Magnification. CDC 2057. Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. “Black death was not spread by rat fleas, say researchers” reported in the Guardian Reportedly it was “pneumonic” rather than “bubonic” as previously thought. Fortunately it was a very, very long time ago, although there have been many …

“…antibiotic resistance genes may be transported via aerosols on local scales”

In their just published paper in Environmental Science & Technology, “Tetracycline Resistance and Class 1 Integron Genes Associated with Indoor and Outdoor Aerosols,” Alison L. Ling, Norman R. Pace, Mark T. Hernandez, and Timothy M. LaPara have found that genes escape the indoor environment and can be found 2 km away. The abstract can be …

“The Germ Guy: Confessions of a Mercurial Microbiologist” blog (microBEnet blog of the day)

The Germ Guy is today’s microBEnet microbiology’s Blog of the Day.  Blogs are taken from list of Microbiology Blogs we have curated at microBEnet.  The germ guy blog is by Jason “Germ Guy” Tetro and it focuses on  “A personal and unique look at germs, hygiene and staying healthy.”  He is pretty active in media and social media (e.g., follow him on …