About a month ago, listeria found in Sabra Hummus caused a massive food safety recall across the US. So I got to thinking — how common are pathogens in the food we eat and how is this addressed on industrial scales? Food is processed, transported, and eaten in our built environments multiple times a day, …
I admit, I am intrigued by the use of baby cages in recent history. Under what circumstances is outdoor air better than indoor air – from a microbial exposure perspective – is an ongoing and fascinating question. The image of a baby hanging out a window in a chicken-wire cage graphically encapsulates that debate. Talk of baby cages …
This is the third of three posts about the planetary protection workshop I attended at NASA Ames from March 24-26, 2015. The first is here. I mentioned, in my last post on forward contamination, that reverse contamination is the primary concern for Planetary Protection (PP). In this context, reverse contamination refers to the transport of Martian …
This is the second of three posts about the planetary protection workshop I attended at NASA Ames from March 24-26, 2015. The first is here (and here.) Forward contamination, in the context of planetary protection, refers to the transport of microbes from Earth to Mars. The title of the workshop, and many talk titles refer to “human …
reposted from jennomics.com http://www.nasa.gov/ames/events/ppw2015workshop/#.VRMLLJPF8mU I’m at a NASA Ames workshop this week. The goal is to have a discussion about planetary protection with respect to human spaceflight, in particular to Mars, mostly during a “sample and return” mission and a little bit about human habitation on Mars. I’m tweeting with #planetaryprotection. There’s also live streaming here: …
An important part of science is owning up to mistakes and doing the best to correct them. A couple months ago we got data from the International Space Station where we had grown up bacteria for our “Microbial Playoffs”. After analyzing the the data we blogged about the winners and disbursed the results far and …
A recent study form Ling et al explored microbial community succession on concrete. They examined the concrete in two sewage manholes over a year using 16S rRNA sequencing. Concrete is a huge part of urban environments, and corrosive microbes eat it away. This causes structural damage, which is especially unwanted in sewage systems. The abstract for the …
Following the last posts about sampling in buildings and other man-made environments, I would like to share the paper I will present at Healthy Buildings 2015 Europe. The paper mainly focuses on sampling advice for practitioners, but we have also tried to explain what the concept of «building microbiome» means to us. Although buildings are not living …
Back in October 2013 I wrote a blog post here called “Building science measurements in the Hospital Microbiome Project: Part 1” where I described the types of building environmental and operational measurements we were making at the time as part of Jack Gilbert’s Sloan-funded Hospital Microbiome Project (Jeff Siegel at the University of Toronto also played a …
When drainage systems fail, a lot of undesirable effects may follow, from leaks that cause mold to fecal-laden water contaminating groundwater and houses. A study from the Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland found yet another concern we should have about broken or inadequate building drainage. Airflows in pipes can contain aerosolized pathogens and then escape into …