Tara C. Smith
Associate Professor, lab rat (microbiologist/infectious disease epidemiologist) and occasional blogger, full-time nerd.
tsmith
Posts by this author
August 3, 2014
Since yesterday's post, several people have asked me on various social media outlets about the airborne nature of Ebola. Didn't I know about this paper ("Transmission of Ebola virus from pigs to non-human primates"), which clearly showed that Ebola could go airborne?
Indeed I do--I wrote about that…
August 2, 2014
It's odd to see otherwise pretty rational folks getting nervous about the news that the American Ebola patients are being flown back to the United States for treatment. "What if Ebola gets out?" "What if it infects the doctors/pilots/nurses taking care of them?" "I don't want Ebola in the US!"…
August 1, 2014
In the light of the current Ebola outbreak, I thought this post from 2007 was once again highly relevant.
As another Ebola outbreak simmers in Uganda (and appears to be increasing), I recently was in touch with Zoe Young, a water and sanitation expert with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF*, known in…
July 29, 2014
I can hardly do Dr. William Foege justice with a short introduction. He is one of the scientists who led the global smallpox eradication efforts. He developed the concept of ring vaccination, which targeted vaccination to those individuals around a known case of smallpox. This concept really made…
July 24, 2014
Eleven years ago, two scientists made a bet. One scientist wagered that a new type of antimicrobial agent, called antimicrobial peptides, would not elicit resistance from bacterial populations which were treated with the drugs. Antimicrobial peptides are short proteins (typically 15-50 amino acids…
July 20, 2014
[audio mp3="/files/aetiology/files/2014/08/Tara-C-Smith-Interview-John-and-Amy-8-7-14.mp3"][/audio]
July 20, 2014
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May 31, 2014
Perhaps because it's college graduation and reunion time, L.V. Anderson at Slate has written a column entitled "People Still Say They 'Went to College in Boston,' Meaning Harvard? Please Stop Doing This." She claims that by giving such an evasive answer, one "buy[s] into the overblown mythos of…
May 28, 2014
After this post on antibiotic resistance, many of you may have seen an exchange on Twitter calling me out for being "knee-jerk" about my call to action to do something about the overuse of antibiotics. In that post, I focused on antibiotic use in agriculture, giving only brief mention to human…
May 15, 2014
Yesterday's post was frustrating. However, if anything good came out of it, it was some sharing of stories and mutual affirmations on the Twitters that yes, this happens to women all too frequently; yes, it's obnoxious; and that hopefully some people viewing it thought about their own internalized…
May 13, 2014
Just wrapped up a meeting sponsored by the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, and Policy and Princeton University's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Institute on the topic of antibiotic resistance at the animal-human interface. While I was there, I hopped on…
May 13, 2014
It's a parent's worst nightmare. Your healthy child is suddenly ill. The doctors you've trusted to treat him are unable to do anything about it. Drugs that we've relied upon for decades are becoming increasingly useless as bacteria evolve resistance to them. New drugs are few and far between. Old…
April 29, 2014
Guest post by Jessica Parsons.
In November 2013 my son, Finn, was diagnosed at 3 months old with Ewing Sarcoma. The news that your child has a potentially life threatening disease at the beginning of their life is something that no parent is prepared for. Despite the scary news, he has completed 9…
April 4, 2014
Ebola has surfaced again. After a hiatus of over a year without any new identified outbreaks, the virus has reemerged in western Africa, in the first-ever multi-country outbreak of the Zaire strain of Ebola. As of this writing, there have been 122 suspected cases of the disease in Guinea (24…
March 28, 2014
Mayim Bialik is an actress. She grew up playing TV's "Blossom," and recently has surfaced again on television as Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler, a neurobiologist on "The Big Bang Theory." In between, she went to college and on to grad school, receiving a PhD in neuroscience. She is a "Brand Ambassador" for…
March 16, 2014
Some who oppose vaccination do so, at least in part, because of concerns that pharmaceutical companies make profits off of vaccines. Many recommend alternative products, including supplements, in lieu of protective vaccinations.
As such, it's a very...interesting...relationship that the anti-…
March 13, 2014
Being a new parent is exhausting. All of a sudden, you're out of the hospital and on your own with this amazing, tiny human, and you alone are responsible for her care. You're given reams of paperwork about feeding and sleeping, developmental milestones, red flags to look out for. You're inundated…
February 26, 2014
This week at #scio14, Danielle Lee is leading a discussion on privilege in science. I'd started this post and abandoned it a few weeks back, but I think it speaks to a similar phenomenon as she describes in her post. Low-income students are being lost not only to science, but often to the college…
January 1, 2014
Guest post by Tim Fothergill, Ph.D.
In January of this year the British Chief Medical Officer urged her government to add threat posed by superbugs to the official list of "Apocalypses to Worry About" along with catastrophic terrorist attacks and massive flooding. With typical British…
December 19, 2013
Part I: the microbiology of zombies
Part II: ineffective treatments and how not to survive the apocalypse
Part III: “We’re all infected”
Part IV: hidden infections
Part V: beware the bite?
December 17, 2013
Have a new article up today on Medscape (free registration required) on human-animal infections: a primer for clinicians.
December 10, 2013
While I loved Jeanne Garbarino's recent post, "Want to promote women in STEM? Leave home life out of the discussion", and agree with probably 90% of it, I think it unfortunately goes from one extreme to another with some of her recommendations.
Garbarino notes several reasons why she thinks it's…
December 4, 2013
Regular readers keeping up on infectious disease issues might have seen Seth Mnookin's post yesterday, warning of an upcoming episode of the Katie Couric show focusing on the HPV vaccine. Even though Mnookin previously spoke with a producer at length regarding this topic, the promo for the show…
November 21, 2013
Now that seemingly the flu outbreak storyline has been wrapped up on The Walking Dead (unsurprisingly, but disappointingly, with their ineffective treatments proving to be miracle cures), there's still one more zombie microbiology topic I'd like to cover: what's up with the bite, and is it the…
November 5, 2013
(As previously, spoilers abound)
So on this week's Walking Dead soap opera, we find that Daryl/Michonne's group is still out and about searching for medical supplies. Back at the prison, the food situation is dire (apparently all the food stores were in the cell block where the infection broke out…
October 31, 2013
Warning: here be spoilers
In many latter-day zombie movies, books, and TV shows, zombie-ism has a biological cause. In 28 Days Later, the infection is caused by the "Rage" virus, which escaped from a lab when animal rights activists break in and release a group of infected chimpanzees. Of course,…
October 28, 2013
(Spoilers. And things.)
After the start of season 4 of the Walking Dead and the introduction of a new nemesis: a fast-spreading, deadly infectious disease that seems to be a strain of influenza, I was looking forward to the plot arc of this season.
And then episode 3, "Isolation", happened. From an…
October 23, 2013
(Spoilers below!)
For Walking Dead fans and readers of this blog, you probably know why I was all excited about some of the plot elements that have been included thus far this season: possible zoonotic disease, and in particular, a potential influenza outbreak that may have originated in pigs. I…
October 22, 2013
As part of the recent move, I've been revamping all kinds of websites. I have a new Facebook site to aggregate all my research and writing projects, and a new personal website for an overview of everything that I do (and have done). Thanks to RO Design, I also have a new lab logo. Stay tuned for…
August 22, 2013
Almost 9 years ago, I arrived in Iowa City as a fresh-faced new assistant professor, just off my post-doc and simultaneously amazingly excited and horrifically terrified at what I'd gotten myself into. After several false starts and a rough few years both personally and professionally, I found my…