Every year a new class of students start their medical training with a white coat ceremony. The white coat is so synonymous with "Doctor," it seems they have been the medical uniform for centuries. In fact, the coat that carries with it so much prestige (and, it turns out, bacteria) has only been around for about 100 years. Is it time to let the white coat go?
Exploration of the Golden Age of Microbiology would not be complete without a look at how its discoveries impacted hospitals and medical care. Today’s post takes us into the 1800s hospital, where the “good old surgical stink” was just as familiar as the blood-stained aprons worn (with some pride) by doctors. In fact, that “stink” was what led one pioneering microbiologist to make a very helpful connection.
There is an astounding array of cleaning products available at your local store, online, and probably just sitting under your sink. Does it matter what you use to clean up after someone in your family has been ill? Absolutely. Today's post will help you pick the right product for your clean-up requirements.
Hospitals clean with great attention to what organisms caused illness within that patient room. The pathogen could be a virus, a bacteria, a fungus, or other microorganism. Each pathogen has its own unique characteristics that dictate the kind of cleanser needed, the frequency of cleaning required, and many other factors. Even though some of the organisms causing hospital-acquired infections are different than those that cause our typical community-acquired infections, we should use this same type of approach in our home cleaning. First, let’s learn about the viruses and bacteria that cause most of our sick days.
This post discusses diagnosis, symptoms, and details about illnesses that are not intended to be taken as medical advice. Always discuss health issues with your doctor.
Whether someone in your home has been sick, or you simply want to reduce the spread of outside germs into your quarantine environment, one of the first things you want to do is clean up. But what needs to be cleaned? And what cleaner is needed? These are some critical questions that can be answered with a little help from the cleaning professionals in a hospital. Let’s bring some of the lessons learned from hospital cleaning home as we clean house!
Millions of American children return to school over the next week, officially kicking off the academic year filled promise. Alongside the promise of learning new things comes another promise: The certainty of picking up some kind of bug that will cause anything from the sniffles to time in bed. Today we'll explore some of the major pathogens that strike in busy classrooms full of kids as well as a few steps you can take to avoid some of those hallway bullies.
We are now well into the first week of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The first medals have been awarded and the pre-opening frenzy about incomplete structures has calmed down. One concern, however, keeps coming up – the health of those competing in and attending these games of the XXXI Olympiad. More specifically, the threat of the Zika virus and bacteria in the water. This issue has made us wonder about the history of the intersection of the Olympics and infectious diseases has led to our determination that the most important event at any Olympics is the one you never hear about: Epidemiology.
Around 248 million years ago, a mass extinction wipes out most life on Earth. Half of all animal families become extinct. Almost every single marine species is erased, including thousands of species of trilobite. Among the hardy survivors is a trilobite cousin, a 10-legged, 9-eyed, carapace-covered creature, living in the shallow waters of a ravaged planet.
Fast forward 200 million years, and our survivor continues to live in these shallow waters, a small creature surrounded by giant dinosaurs. When another mass extinction hits the Earth, these giants succumb, along with about half of marine invertebrates. But not our survivor, whose unchanged shape and size allow him to soldier on, even through several ice ages.
Who is this survivor, a living fossil that looks like a rock, moves like a tank, and chews food with its legs?
