microbiology
mikethemadbiologist | September 20, 2006A CDC website lays out how we actually identify an outbreak of O157:H7. Guess what? It doesn't happen like it does in the movies or on TV. This is why keeping these networks fully functional (i.e., adequately funded) matters: time is critical and delays in processing due to inadequate resources or personnel can be deadly. For kicks, imagine if this were something far more contagious than a food-borne pathogen.
Here's the timeline:
1. Incubation time: The time from eating the contaminated food to the beginning of symptoms. For E. coli O157, this is typically 3-4 days.
2. Time to…
mikethemadbiologist | September 20, 2006Geneticists often use the phrase wild type to describe the dominant allele--genetic variant--of a gene. In microbiology, we typically assume that the wild type of a bacterium is sensitive to antibiotics, and that the rare mutants (and recombinants) are antibiotic resistant.
My colleague, Susan Foster, at the end of a seminar she presented to clinicians in Southern California, asked her audience to anonymously write down the percentage of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) at their hospitals.
The result?
The median percentage of methicillin resistance was 60% (the average was…
mikethemadbiologist | September 18, 2006Over at Viva la Evolucion!, there's a new edition of Animalcules, the Carnival o'the Wee Beasties. I have a post there. There's also a really good post about Vibrio cholerae--the critter that causes cholera.
mikethemadbiologist | September 15, 2006
(from here)
There's been an outbreak of E. coli food poisoning due to contaminated lettuce. This gives me an opportunity to briefly talk about one of my favorite organisms, Escherichia coli. But first, from the AP:
Consumers nationwide should not eat fresh bagged spinach, say health officials probing a multistate outbreak of E. coli that killed at least one person and made dozens of others sick.
Food and Drug Administration and state officials don't know the cause of the outbreak, although raw, packaged spinach appears likely. "We're advising people not to eat it," said Dr. David Acheson…
mikethemadbiologist | September 15, 2006From Kristine at Amused Muse:
People are always pointing at scientists and screaming, "Why don't you find a cure for cancer?" Well, now that scientists finally have, loopy-loo fundies deny the treatment for their daughters! Screw them. Not only should this vaccination be required for all young girls, any parent who seriously thinks that this "encourages immorality" should have his or her children taken away. They aren't fit to be parents.
Pregnancy as punishment, cancer as coercion. Welcome to Bush's America.
mikethemadbiologist | September 3, 2006A recent study demonstrates that treatment failure of P. aeruginosa pneumonia infections due to antibiotic resistance is critical: a resistant infection is four times as likely to kill a patient as a sensitive one.
Mortality Rate Is Twice As High In Patients With Pneumonia Caused By Highly Resistant Bacteria
Patients suffering from hospital-acquired pneumonia caused by a type of bacteria that is highly resistant to virtually all antibiotics are twice as likely to die as patients infected with other, less resistant bacteria.
A study published recently in the journal Critical Care shows for…
mikethemadbiologist | August 21, 2006One of the 'low tech' life-saving advances for HIV patients has been the prophylactic use of the antibiotic cotrimoxazole. Cotrimoxazole, a combination of two antibiotics, trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole, is effective against bacteria, including Pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia ("PCP") and toxoplasmosis, two of the leading killers of AIDS patients. The WHO's support of universal prophylaxis of HIV patients with cotrimoxazole will greatly increase the adoption of this critical disease prevention strategy.
Many developing countries have been reluctant to adopt the use of this drug as a…
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2006That's right--you heard it here first: algal blooms on the Charles River in Boston. Spake Universal Hub:
A blogger by the name of Mike the Mad Biologist, proving why we should get all our news from Technorati and Google Blogsearch, scoops the Globe by more than a week on the story (hmm, if a blogger posts in the Charles when nobody's around, does he still get coated in green slime?).
What's really sad is that none of the crack reporters at the Globe cared or knew that the water in the Charles River was fluorescent green for at least a week. Next time, you guys might want to check that out…
sporte | August 17, 2006When can a really bad virus be used to do something good?
When we can use it to learn.
The human immunodeficiency virus, cause of AIDS, scourge of countries, and recent focus of ScienceBlogs; like humans, evolves. As one of my fellow ScienceBloggers noted, few biological systems demonstrate evolution as clearly as HIV. In this series, I'm going to guide you through some experiments on HIV evolution that you can do yourself. You won't even have to put on any special clothing (unless you want to), wash glassware or find an autoclave. And, you don't need to any UNIX commands or borrow a…
mikethemadbiologist | August 15, 2006...but I think that God's got a sick sense of humor."* From the Back Bay Sun:
A planned demonstration in front of the Shaw's supermarket near the Prudential Center was foiled, not by police but by a bad case of food poisoning.
The demonstrators, from an environmental group called Oceana, were set to picket outside the Shaw's at 53 Huntington Avenue last Monday morning. Instead, the group of activists spent the morning recuperating from food poisoning. The core group of picketers, as it turns out, had eaten at a Boston restaurant the night before and fallen ill.
Katie Burnham, media advisor…
mikethemadbiologist | August 11, 2006Since I'm off to Woods Hole to give a lecture about antibiotic resistance, I thought this interview from the old site with Dr. Henrik C. Wegener about antibiotics and agriculture would be appropriate.
In looking through some things at work, I came across this interview with Henrik C. Wegener, Ph.D., Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Antimicrobial Research and Foodborne Pathogens and the Danish Institute for Food and Veterinary Research about antibiotics and agriculture. It's from 2004, but it's still pretty good (it's interesting how, on the internet, once something gets past two…
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2006Joseph beat me to it: there's a Nature article about platensimycin, an antibiotic that inhibits lipid biosynthesis in Gram positive bacteria. While it's not in human trials yet, it's always good to have another antibiotic that's effective against MRSA and VRE. Now, if it only worked against Acinetobacter...
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2006There's a very interesting article in Emerging Infectious Diseases about which risk factors are likely to result in an increased likelihood of a macrolide (a class of antibiotics) resistant Streptococcus pneumonial infection. One important factor: having failed to take a full course of antibiotic therapy in the previous six months. In other words, patients didn't listen to their doctor. Usually, the arguments for responsible use of antibiotics revolve around not making a general problem worse for others. Here we have pretty compelling evidence that if you're stupid and don't do what your…
mikethemadbiologist | August 6, 2006I was at the Esplanade in Boston, and I noticed something very weird in the water. By the Fairfield St. entrance, the water under the bridge and by the shore (on both sides, river and 'canal') was bright green, as if someone had dumped dye or paint in the water. When I got real close and then fished out some of the green water, I noticed that it wasn't die or paint at all, but tiny (<1mm) algal colonies (I think). I have no idea what kind of algae they were (sorry, I didn't have my dissecting microscope handy). If there are any other Bostonian readers, have you seen this? And whom…
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2006One of the lesser known microbiology facts is that the pathogen Shigella is actually E. coli. From the archives, here's an explanation (with a little modification).
As I mentioned in a previous post, Orac has two very good posts on MDs and creationism. In one of the posts, he links to a creationist medical student who writes the following:
Has anyone ever documented a plateful of Strep pneumo mutating into E coli? Or even into Strep pyogenes? I didn't think so. They mutate, and they exchange information. But they remain separate species, with their own unique characteristics. Staph aureus…
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2006Because that's what it will come to if the medical establishment fails to confront the hospital-acquired infection problem head on.
In 2004, 90,000 in the U.S. died from hospital-acquired infections, and two million had a hospital-acquired infection--and in my opinion, those are conservative estimates (the reporting issues are very complex, but the short version is that many infections are simply never reported).
At some point, a clever class-action attorney is going to figure this out, and then everything will go sideways. You do not want the courts creating public health policy (they did…
mikethemadbiologist | July 30, 2006
And if a lot of people actually take charlatan Kevin Trudeau seriously, we'll be seeing a lot of dead people. Stupid, dead people. Christopher Wanjek and Orac take down the fraud Kevin Trudeau's new book More Natural Cures Revealed. Writes Wanjek:
Bacteria and viruses don't cause disease, which is why you don't "catch" cancer or diabetes; disease is caused by an imbalance of vital energy. Here Trudeau mixes the concept of communicable and non-communicable disease. First, Trudeau needs to visit Uganda with his balanced vital energy and avoid malaria. This denial of pathogens as the cause…
mikethemadbiologist | July 29, 2006While the main reason to use antibiotics only when needed is to preserve their effectiveness, it's always nice to have an economic incentive coupled with proper use of these important drugs. From the Guernsey Press and Star:
The States prescribing support unit is claiming success in a campaign to encourage islanders to think more carefully about their need for the drugs.
Prescriptions fell by 983 courses - a reduction of 3.3% on the previous year - between October 2005 and March 2006, reducing costs to the States by £30,000.
'That is a significant reduction in what is the peak season for…
mikethemadbiologist | July 28, 2006From the archives, comes this post about the health crisis no one cares about (except for the Mad Biologist. We are very caring): the 90,000 deaths per year from infections people get while in the hospital. And this number is probably an underestimate.
Bacterial infections aren't sexy: no one walks, bikes, hops, pogo sticks for the cure. There are no ribbons, no bumper stickers, and no hot celebrities (damn!). Yet, according to the CDC, bacterial infections acquired in hospitals kill at least 90,000 people per year in the U.S. Granted some of those who died would have died from something…
mikethemadbiologist | July 27, 2006Lest you think corporate interference in public health policy is solely a U.S. problem, New Zealand is suffering a brain drain in the area of antibiotic resistance research due to political pressure hindering research on the effects of antbiotic use in agriculture. Worldwide, antibiotics are widely used in poultry production, but in the U.S., there was a successful attempt to ban the use of enrofloxacin (a ciprofloxacin analogue commonly known as "Cipro") in poultry production (enrofloxacin is already banned in other forms of meat production).
From the Sunday Star Times:
Scientists say…