Antibiotics Susceptibility Pattern of Hospital Indoor Airborne Bacteria

Jonathan drew my attention to this paper on antibiotic susceptibility of 153 bacterial isolates collected from a hospital in Ethiopia. I thought the numerous grammatical errors in the paper would parallel with the quality of the study, but I was pleasantly disproved. In the abstract they state, “86.9% [of the 153 isolates] were resistant to …

WSJ article on the Hospital Microbiome Project

A nice article by Robert Lee Hotz in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal called “Designing a Hospital to Better Fight Infection“. The article summarizes data from the 3-year Hospital Microbiome Project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York. and quotes Emily Landon, Julie Segre, James Meadow, Jack Gilbert, and Jessica Green. From the article: …

Building science measurements in the Hospital Microbiome Project: Part 2

  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 …

Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem–The Future of Hospitals? (NOVA Online)

Great article from Brooke Borel writing for NOVA Online, “Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem–The Future of Hospitals?”. This covers some of the background of microbiology in hospitals, discusses work by both the BioBE Center and microBEnet… and of course the Hospital Microbiome Project as well as the NICU study from Jill Banfield’s lab.  The article …

Infection Prevention Based Hospital Design

Health care associated infections (HAIs) also known as nosocomial infections  occurred in 4.5 out of every 100 hospital admissions in 2002 and contributed to 99,000 deaths (Klevens 2002). In the past many prevention strategies have focused on human based transmission (such as consistent hand washing) ignoring less obvious preventative measures such as those involving a …

Building science measurements in the Hospital Microbiome Project: Part 1

First of all, Happy Halloween everyone. I think my costume this year will be a blogger! For those that don’t know me, I’m Brent Stephens, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL. I call my research team the Built Environment Research Group …

New paper & meeting report on “The Hospital Microbiome Project”

Quick post to call attention to this meeting report: The Hospital Microbiome Project: Meeting Report for the 2nd Hospital Microbiome Project, Chicago, USA, January 15th, 2013 | Gilbert | Standards in Genomic Sciences. From the paper “This report details the outcome of the 2nd Hospital Microbiome Project workshop held on January 15th at the University of …