“Superbug” Candida auris fungus emerging in U.S. hospitals

Quick post here just to alert people to this story about a drug resistant Candida auris fungus variety showing up more and more. Of relevance to the microbiology of the built environment crowd is the following quote: The fungus can be passed between people or through the environment from such things as hospital equipment, says Dr. Tom …

Health + Energy Research Consortium

. The Biology and the Built Environment Center (BioBE) and Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory (ESBL) at the University of Oregon, are pleased to announce the launch of the the Health + Energy Research Consortium!  On May 4-5, 2017, in Portland Oregon, we begin our journey to dramatically reduce energy consumption and maximize human health …

Your help is wanted in this #CitizenMicrobiology project: “BashTheBug – Help us fight antibiotic resistance!”

Just found out about this new Citizen Microbiology project via Andrew Su on Twitter who retweeted a post of Jennifer Gardy’s A neat citizen science project launched today as part of the big TB sequencing consortium -help spot drug resistance https://t.co/rFHsrmdBJk — Jennifer Gardy (@jennifergardy) April 7, 2017 Source: BashTheBug – Help us fight antibiotic resistance! …

Job: antibiotic resistance in 100k TB genomes

Hi All I’d just like to highlight a job we are advertising, to lead the bioinformatic (sequence+variation) analysis of 100,000 M tuberculosis genomes which we are sequencing (WGS), ~50,000 of which will be phenotyped for 12 drugs, and the remainder for some subset. Note the deadline is very soon – Monday 6th March! This project …

A sinking feeling: misleading headline but interesting paper on tracking spread of microbes in sinks

There is an interesting new paper out of interest.  I found out about this through Twitter Study reports multidrug resistant #bacteria found in #hospital sinks – New research in @ASMicrobiology‘s #AEM https://t.co/0i7GKoPmUE pic.twitter.com/ZM9gAavL2t — ASM Newsroom (@ASMnewsroom) February 24, 2017   Now this caught my attention because it seemed to be about, well, multidrug resistant …

Investigating the antibiotic resistome of rural and peri-urban Latin America

For many years, efforts to profile the antibiotic resistome of the human gut focused exclusively on two extremes of human society: Western, industrialized cities and remote hunter-gatherers. While these studies were undoubtedly important, they overlooked the majority of the world’s population, which exists somewhere between the two extremes. Indeed, three-quarters of the world’s population lives …

Ants as (Possible) Vectors of Bacteria in Hospital Environments

Not really sure what to think about this article:  Ants as Vectors of Bacteria in Hospital Environments. Published in the Journal of Microbiology Research and authored by Bruna Rafaela Machado Oliveira, Luciano Ferreira de Sousa, Raquel Chalá Soares, Thiago César Nascimento, Marcelo Silva Madureira, Jorge Luiz Fortuna. In a quick scan the science seems reasonable. …

Worth a look: Special issue of @NYASAnnals on “Antimicrobial Therapeutics Reviews” 

  There is a whole issue of the Annals of the NY Academy of Sciences that may be of interest.  The focus of the issue is on Antimicrobial Therapeutics Reviews. Some of the papers are freely available.  These are Resistance diagnosis and the changing epidemiology of antibiotic resistance(pages 5–17) by David McAdams Resistance diagnosis and the changing …

Worth a read: Post by @SharonJPeacock & Claire Chewapreecha on tracking pathogen/biothreat behind #melioidosis

Quick post here.  Nice short post in the On Health Blog at Biomed Central on studies of the population genomics of Burkholderia. Melioidosis is a frequently fatal infectious disease caused by a bacterium (Burkholderia pseudomallei) found in soil in certain parts of the world. We have known about melioidosis for many years, but it’s only …