Justin's Microbiology Journal
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Currently finishing up food-borne pathogens such as salmonella, campylobacter, and clostridium. After that I have one chapter on microorganisms and industry, and it's off to organic chemistry.
I'm starting to have reservations about working in labs with stories like these. Luckily anthrax is very manageable when you have a known exposure, unlike some other viruses and exotoxins.
Friday, June 04, 2004
Apparently it's not particularly safe to run a lab from your home. Not necessarily from a health perspective but from a legal perspective. Here's a professor who was charged with bioterrorism. I have to take issue with the professor's stated goals, his agenda was not purely benign. Anyone who professes to believe in releasing mutated strains of plants or bacteria into the wild is basically irresponsible.
It's depressing to me, but it really does take just a limited amount of knowledge and readily available supplies for terrorists to culture harmful bioagents. It's not a question of if, but a question of when some terrorist will kill more people than Aum Shinrikyo.
But the more people we have working in microbiology and related fields, the more we'll learn about vaccination, detection, and clinical treatment for various ailments. I'm glad I'm in the field now.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Spent today observing clinical practice at a local ER. I tip my hats to the doctors, nurses and administrators who work the ER, it's exhausting. Just 4 or so hours there and I was tired (but incredibly interested).
I was especially interested in the lab reports for various patients and the frequencies and correlations for various bacteriological problems. Lots of E Coli UTIs, lesser amounts of other UTIs, and a few wound or blood based staphylococcus aureus.
It was good to see the lab results showed some drug resistances, but given testing against a complement of 6-10 antibiotics, each culture was susceptible to at least one or two common antibiotics, including the Staph Aureus.
One of the more interesting ones was a majorly resistant e coli strain. It was resistant to many of the beta lactam derivative antibiotics, but did now show signs of a plasmid mediated beta-lactamase, one route of resistance for cephalosporins, penicillins, and aztreonam. Apparently several different routes for antibiotic resistance exist, including modifying their DNA gyrase, creating cellular membrane pumps to remove antibiotics, and methylating their ribosomes to deactivate antibiotic binding.
