My research
tsmith | April 30, 2015I've been working on livestock-associated Staphylococcus aureus and farming now for almost a decade. In that time, work from my lab has shown that, first, the "livestock-associated" strain of methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) that was found originally in Europe and then in Canada, ST398, is in the United States in pigs and farmers; that it's present here in raw meat products; that "LA" S. aureus can be found not only in the agriculture-intensive Midwest, but also in tiny pig states like Connecticut. With collaborators, we've also shown that ST398 can be found in unexpected places, like…
tsmith | October 22, 2013As 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 some upcoming new posts as well!
tsmith | February 21, 2012I recently gave a talk to a group here in Iowa City, emphasizing just how frequently we share microbes. It was a noontime talk over a nice lunch, and of course I discussed how basically we humans are hosts to all kinds of organisms, and analysis of our "extended microbiome" shows that we share not only with each other, but also with a large number of other species. We certainly do this with my particular organism of interest, Staphylococcus aureus. There are many reports in the literature showing where humans have apparently spread their strains of S. aureus to their pets (dogs, cats,…
tsmith | January 19, 2012Back in November, I blogged about one of our studies, examining methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Iowa meat products. In that post, I mentioned that it was one of two studies we'd finished on the subject. Well, today the second study is out in PLoS ONE (freely available to all). In this study, we focused only on pork products, and included 395 samples from Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. We also looked at not only conventional meats, but also "alternative" meat products. Most of the latter were products labeled "raised without antibiotics" or "raised without antibiotic…
tsmith | November 9, 2011I've blogged previously on a few U.S. studies which investigated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in raw meat products (including chicken, beef, turkey, and pork). This isn't just a casual observation as one who eats food--I follow this area closely as we also have done our own pair of food sampling investigations here in Iowa, and will be doing a much larger, USDA-funded investigation of the issue over the next 5 years.
Let me sum up where the field currently stands. There have been a number of studies looking at S. aureus on raw meat products, carried out both here in North…
tsmith | June 13, 2011Ah, classes are finally over. The last two summers I've taught a short, intense course in Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology, condensing a semester's worth of work into a week. It's a fun course to teach, but exhausting--after teaching, I head back home or to the office to finish last-minute preparation for the next day's talks and assignments, and by the time that's done, the nightly student homework is rolling into my email inbox for me to grade and comment on for the next morning. By Friday, I feel like a zombie who hasn't seen my family in a week.
But, it's now wrapped up for…
tsmith | May 10, 2011Maryn McKenna was awesome enough to take some time out of her vacation to blog about our recent ST398 paper, finding "livestock-associated" S. aureus in a daycare worker. She raised one question I didn't really address previously, regarding our participation by kids and workers at the facility (eight kids out of 168, and 24 out of 60 staff members).
(Staph screening is very non-invasive, by the way; it effectively involves twirling a long-handled Q-tip inside the front of your nostrils. Kinda makes you wonder why families would not have wanted to participate. On the other hand, since Iowa is…
tsmith | May 6, 2011The University of Iowa press office did a nice story on our recent article showing "livestock-associated" S. aureus in a daycare worker in Iowa. LabSpaces covers it here.
I started a new Facebook page for our research center, the University of Iowa Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases. Join up for research updates! We'll have a lot coming up this summer.
And on that note, soon we'll have a new Research Assistant starting at the Center: Megan Quick, who was featured today on in the "Photo of the Month" on the Association for Schools of Public Health website.
Have a few blog posts…