Illustration (from OpenScar.com) an explanation of the beginning of the spread of SARS in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex where the index case was in a building 60 meters away from a building where about 45% of the 300 infected individuals at Amoy Gardens lived. Many of the other infected individuals also lived in …
We’ve just added a new link on our resources page — a whole lot of lectures by Keith Redway of the University of Westminister. The list includes the following: Recombinant DNA Technology & GM (3BIO7M4, 3BIO7X1) Laboratory Management & Safety (3GAM405) Medical Microbiology (3MED666) History of Microbiology Medically important bacteria Transfer of antibiotic resistance – …
Next in our “People Behind the Science” video series we have an interview with Scott Kelley from San Diego State. Here he’s talking about his Sloan-funded work on viruses in the built environment… an understudied and under-appreciated topic for sure. Transcript:
(From Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech) We are seeking a post-doctoral researcher for a project to develop a nanotechnology-based sensor for airborne viruses. The ideal candidate will have experience with experimental techniques related to the generation, sampling, and detection of specific microorganisms in bioaerosols. The post-doctoral researcher will be co-advised by Dr. Linsey Marr and …
Going through the list of Microbiology Blogs we have curated at microBEnet and going to try to feature one of them every day or so. And just going to do this in semi-alphabetic order. Today’s blog: BacterioFiles (which is a podcast series with a blog with details about each post, but I view podcasts as simply audio-enhanced blogs). Author: …
An article in the Sunday NYT on the Ecology of Disease — paints with a very broad brush that ignores the role of the microbiology of the built (and especially the indoor) environment, where we spend most of our time and most likely acquire most of our diseases. What the article ignores underscores the importance …
Beyond recent posts about Legionella, we don’t talk a lot about the built environment of municipal water systems, although Norm Pace and his group at CU Boulder have done extensive work on the topic in recent years. Therefore I thought I’d better point to this study, published a couple of weeks ago in Environmental Health …
Viruses often tend to be overlooked in microbiological surveys of the built environment. This is because they don’t show up in either culture-based methods (which are specific to bacteria or fungi) or the commonly employed newer technique of ribosomal RNA sequencing (because viruses don’t have ribosomes). Even in metagenomic analyses where viral sequences are present …
Interesting new article in Time Magazine’s healthland: A New Study Shows That Sitting Close to a Sick Person on a Flight Can Make You Sick – – TIME Healthland. The article is based on a new paper in Emerging Infectious Diseases: Transmission of Influenza on International Flights, May 2009 which basically examines transmission dynamics of flu within …
A new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B is a bit disconcerting. The paper “Skin as a potential source of infectious foot and mouth disease aerosols” is by Michael Dillon from Lawrence Livermore Labs (I have added the reference to the microBEnet collections at Mendeley and CiteULike). A bit more about the …