microbiology
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2007Yum. Theological conservative tastes GOOOODDD!
Full disclosure: I have never bought into the belief of the Compulsive Centrists that John McCain is a moderate. A detailed look at his voting record shows that he is often very conservative, with the occasional moment of lucidity (e.g., recognizing that global warming is actually happening). But it is truly pathetic to watch a man who clearly doesn't agree with the theological conservatives twist himself into a pretzel in an effort to placate them. He's done it with evolution. Now, he is 'confused' about condoms:
The unthinkable has…
mikethemadbiologist | March 15, 2007To prevent brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that statements by Michael Egnor be read using approved devices such as the StupidView9000
Orac bravely dives deeper into the Discovery Institute's creationist drivel, and reports on the continuing ignorant idiocy of Michael Egnor. I don't know what's worse: Egnor's willful ignorance, or his pseudo-victimization complex. Let's deal with the ignorance first.
In an interview with Casey Luskin, Egnor states (italics mine):
EGNOR: Well, it's a pretty funny claim on the part of Darwinists. It's sort of like Al Gore claiming that he…
mikethemadbiologist | March 14, 2007Who would ever think that 'wastewater lagoons'--lakes full of animal shit--could be so interesting? And important in understanding how agricultural antibiotic use increases the frequency of antibiotic resistance genes.
A recent study looked at the abundance of tetracycline resistance genes in eight lagoons that stored cattle waste. Two of the lagoons were used with cattle that were never exposed to tetracycline. Two were 'mixed use', and four high use, where the cattle have been exposed to tetracycline (an aside: the lagoon from which the waste is used as fertilizer is a high use lagoon.…
mikethemadbiologist | March 13, 2007Last night, I was reading some of the comments you leave here, and, in response to a post about a surgeon who thinks evolution is irrelevant to medical practice (Got Antibiotic Resistance?), fellow ScienceBlogling Mark left a comment. I'll get to the comment in a minute, but tragically, I hear stories like his far too often. Mark writes (italics original):
Mike, you've nailed exactly what pisses me off so much about Egnor. Right now, we're talking about something that's become deeply personal to me.
Since January, my father has been paralyzed from the waist down. The cause of it is MRSA. He…
sporte | March 13, 2007Blogging from the NW ASM branch meeting, part II
Yesterday, I wrote about the some of present (and future) methods that are (or will be) used in clinical labs to identify pathogenic microbes. In these next two posts, I want to describe the talks I attended on antibiotic resistance, from Xuan Qin and Fred Tenover (CDC), and some new things that I learned.
How do bacteria survive when their human hosts take a lot of antibiotics?
Children's Hospital (Seattle) routinely sees about 200 children with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that only appears when you have two copies…
mikethemadbiologist | March 12, 2007I haven't been able to respond to Michael Egnor's idiocy about evolution because I've been recovering from a meeting, but fortunately my fellow ScienceBloglings have. But I'll add my two cents anyway. Here's the really stupid part from Egnor (italics mine):
Doctors don't study evolution. Doctors never study it in medical school, and they never use evolutionary biology in their practice. There are no courses in medical school on evolution. There are no 'professors of evolution' in medical schools. There are no departments of evolutionary biology in medical schools.
The evolution--not the…
sporte | March 12, 2007It looked like just any other rainy Saturday morning in the Pacific Northwest, but no, this Saturday was a day for microbiology. Reluctantly, I crawled out of my warm bed and headed over to the University of Washington to attend a meeting of the Pacific NW branch of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM).
My goals for this venture were diverse. Of course, I wanted to go hear some good science and see some old friends. But I also wanted to learn more about what microbiologists are actually doing these days, out there in the wild.
In my world, since all we hear about are nucleic acid…
mikethemadbiologist | March 10, 2007One of the little things I liked about Rick Weiss' cefquinome article was a diagram about how antibiotic resistant strains evolve.
One of the confusing things about the evolution of resistance (and natural selection, for that matter) is the notion that the evolution of resistance happens among individuals within populations. This graphic from the Washington Post lays that out quite nicely:
It might be good for students too.
mikethemadbiologist | March 9, 2007There's something very interesting about the unfolding story of the possible FDA cefquinome approval (I've covered it here). After doing a Technorati search, virtually all of the blogs that discuss this issue are either non-partisan or progressive/liberal (I say 'virtually' because I might have missed one, but I actually didn't see any). The rightwing bloggysphere is nowhere to be found. Any thoughts on why that might be? Maybe they are just slow off the mark on this one? Infections don't check political affiliation....
mikethemadbiologist | March 7, 2007Or maybe terrifying is a better word. I just returned from the Network on Antimicrobial Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus meeting, where I learned some very interesting things about S. aureus (since I'm going to refer to MRSA, methicillin resistant S. aureus repeatedly, go check this link if you want to know more about MRSA):
1) 43% of all skin infections in the U.S. are the result of one strain of MRSA. Not 43% of staphylococcal infections. All skin infections.
2) According to the NHANES study, the number of people who carry S. aureus asymptomatically (in other words, it lives up your…
grrlscientist | March 7, 2007The Food and Drug Administration is demonstrating a stunning lack of forethought by preparing to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous -- for people.
The drug, cefquinome, is one of a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defense against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has ever been approved in the United States for use in animals.
The American Medical Association and about a dozen other…
mikethemadbiologist | March 5, 2007...high levels of resistance to cephalosporins and beta-lactam antibiotics are sure to follow. Sunday, the Washington Post covered the FDA approval of the use of cefquinome in cattle to treat respiratory pneumonia. The article provides a pretty good synopsis of what happened, so I won't summarize the whole thing, but this decision represents a complete corruption of the regulatory process by industry. It's that simple.
Here's why cefquinome use in agriculture is really stupid: bacteria that evolve resistance to cefquinome, also become resistant to cefepime, a vital drug in the treatment…
mikethemadbiologist | March 2, 2007There's a very interesting Boston Globe story about Paul Levy, the CEO of Boston's Beth-Israel Deaconess Hospital. He's not only a CEO, but also a blogger. His blog, Running a Hospital, is, well, self-explanatory--I guess you can blog about work...if you're the boss. Levy appears to have started a minor kerfuffle because he has been posting his hospital's catheter-associated ICU infection rates.
Some of the other hospital heads are bothered that Levy is doing this. Personally, I think patients should be informed about infection rates when choosing a hospital, since hospital-acquired…
mikethemadbiologist | March 1, 2007It sure looks that way. Last night, I was talking to a colleague and he told me that several groups, including his, are seeing a very interesting pattern in commensal Escherichia coli (those E. coli that live in everyone's gut and aren't making us sick).
In humans, it appears that roughly 20% of all commensal E. coli belong to one of three clones that have a global distribution (in bacteriology, a clone is a group of very closely related strains). (an aside: In animals, there doesn't appear to be this skewed pattern. In animals, the distribution of clones appears to be more evenly…
mikethemadbiologist | February 28, 2007Moselio Schaechter, former American Society of Microbiology president, has a blog, Small Things Considered. It's pretty good. But the promo letter ASM sent around had one annoying thing (italics mine):
Microbes have entered the blogosphere courtesy of past ASM president Moselio Schaechter, professor emeritus at Tufts and a visiting scholar at the University of San Diego.
Actually, microbes have been in the blogosphere for some time now. Tara immediately comes to mind, along with the regular contributors to Animalcules (not to mention the Mad Biologist, who has a thing or two to say about…
grrlscientist | February 20, 2007Asia is being swamped with an epidemic of counterfeit drugs and the problem is spreading. Malaria medicines have been particularly hard hit; in a recent sampling in Southeast Asia, 53 percent of the antimalarials bought were fakes. But conterfeit antibiotics, tuberculosis drugs, AIDS drugs and even meningitis vaccines have also been found. These counterfeit drugs cause the untimely deaths of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people every year. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that one-fifth of the one million annual deaths from malaria could be prevented…
grrlscientist | February 18, 2007Tuberculosis is a stubborn infection that takes takes six months to treat effectively. As a result, this is the source of many problems in developing countries and when dealing with the homeless. However, doctors from London's St George's Medical School will test a combination of two antibiotics on 1,200 patients in four African countries. These two antobiotics, rifapentine and moxifloxacin, are already in use for this purpose, but are used separately.
This trial, which will start in July, is aimed to both test the effectiveness and safety of the drug combination and to see if a four-month…
grrlscientist | February 18, 2007A research team from the University of Arizona found that the average office desktop harbours 400 times more bacteria than the average office toilet seat. Additionally, they also discovered that, on average, women have three to four times the amount of germs in, on, and around their work area.
The researchers said women's habit of keeping snacks in their drawers could explain why their desks were more germ-ridden.
They also warned that make-up and lotions helped to transfer bacteria.
But they did find that men's wallets are the germiest thing that they looked at.
Cited story.
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tags:…
sporte | February 17, 2007How do microbiologists determine which microbe caused a disease?
As Tara has eloquently described (I, II), we are covered with bacteria and other microbes. A reasonable question then, is when we get sick, how do we which little devil deserves the blame?
In many cases, pathogens (disease-causing organisms) are identified by a common series of steps, known as Koch's postulates. Robert Koch described these steps in 1876 when he used them to prove that Bacillus anthracis was the cause of anthrax. During the past century, his steps have been used successfully many times.
Koch's steps are…
mikethemadbiologist | February 15, 2007I've blogged before about how, for children under five, it's not the 'sexy' microbes that kill, but instead, the run of the mill ones: the bacteria that cause diarrhea and pneumonia are the culprits. One of the things I have heard a lot of recently regarding antibiotic development (and related therapies) is that we need to focus on 'non-paradigm' and non-model organisms. There's a problem with that approach:
The non-standard microbes aren't the ones causing the bulk of bacterial disease.
Oh dear.
In roaming around the International Society for Microbial Resistance website, I came across…