MicrobeWorld

(another excerpt from Wired's Superbug blog)

News from the ICAAC meeting: The “Indian superbug” NDM-1 — actually a gene which encodes an enzyme which confers resistance to almost all known antibiotics — has been found for the first time in a pet, somewhere in the United States.

When you co... Read More

Exposure to cigarette smoke has long been associated with increased frequency of respiratory infections—which are harder to treat in smoke-exposed people than in those who lack such exposures. Now Ritwij Kulkarni of Columbia University, New York, NY, and colleagues show that cigarette smoke actu... Read More

Infections with the bacterium Clostridium difficile hit record numbers in recent years. Now there's evidence the hard-to-treat infections are becoming a problem for children.

The infections often strike the elderly, especially those who've been taking antibiotics that clear out competing bact... Read More

Stomach ulcers could have handed in their chips - thanks to the humble potato.

Scientists at Manchester University have discovered spuds contain unique antibacterial molecules that can treat the condition.

Members of the university’s microbiology team now hope the substance, dubbed ‘pota... Read More

The use of a commonly prescribed antibiotic is a major contributor to the spread of infection in hospitals by the ‘superbug’ MRSA, according to new research. The study also found that increasing measures to prevent infection – such as improved hygiene and hand washing – appeared to have only a s... Read More

Bacteria that live in the soil seem to be swapping antibiotic-resistance genes with other, more dangerous bacteria — the ones that cause devastating infections in humans, a new study indicates.
When a team of researchers analyzed bacteria they had grown from soil samples, they found the microbe... Read More

The impact of influenza on work absenteeism is poorly documented. Researchers used data from the national registry and Norway Post AS (>14,000 employees) to explore sickness absence patterns from 2005/06 through 2009/10 in Norway. Annually, an estimated 2.868% (mean 95% confidence interval (CI):... Read More

Heavy metals and other toxins frequently contaminate food and water. The culprits read like a litany of bad actors—lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, chromium—but their numbers run into the thousands. Microbes have long been enlisted for bioremediation, but they also have the potential to protect ... Read More

A new species of bacteria living 1,200 metres deep at freezing temperatures in the Bay of Bengal is all set to solve the universal problem of lactose intolerance in human beings. Lactose is a type of sugar present in milk. Two-thirds of people around the world cannot digest lactose, which may ca... Read More

Over the past fifteen years, Internet technology has significantly changed the landscape of public health surveillance and epidemic intelligence gathering. Disease and outbreak data is disseminated not only through formal online announcements by government agencies, but also through informal cha... Read More

New research may help explain why hundreds of thousands of Americans a year get sick – and tens of thousands die – after bacteria get into their blood. It also suggests why some of those bloodstream infections resist treatment with even the most powerful antibiotics.

In a new paper in the Jou... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Dickson Despommier

Vincent and Dickson discus... Read More

A wonderful musical A - Z of nasty microbes and related topics. By Jennifer Gardy and friends. Read More

Two chicken vaccines have recombined to produce more virulent viruses in Sydney and Melbourne, research has found, prompting the regulator to examine new controls over the approval and use of veterinary vaccines.

A study by a team from the Asia-Pacific Centre for Animal Health at the Universi... Read More

Three decades ago, some companies began adding a chemical called triclosan to their products and tried to convince consumers that their hand soap or toothpaste was better because it was “anti-bacterial.”

Now, scientists are finding traces of that compound in the environment, and it’s causing ... Read More

Researchers from the Univ. of Rochester and Texas A&M Univ. have found that, over a period of five months following the disastrous 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, naturally occurring bacteria that exist in the Gulf of Mexico consumed and removed at least 200,000 tons of oil and ... Read More

An outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever that began in early July 2012 has involved at least 36 individuals and 16 deaths. So far the disease has been confined to a rural region west of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. The subject of Richard Preston’s scary The Hot Zone, Ebola virus is newsworthy b... Read More

We've all been there. The holidays are approaching and there's that one person on our list for whom we have no idea what to give. It's a common problem that is usually resolved with the purchase of a gift card from a local retailer. From hardware stores to electronic shops to the bookstore, cons... Read More