a culture of service...
August, 2015
© 2015, Hardy Diagnostics, all rights reserved
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Ever wonder what Hardy Diagnostics
is all about?
View our Company Profile here.
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Pharmaceutical Microbiology
Do you do sterility testing and membrane filtration? We have prepared a mini catalog just for you.
Watch a short video demonstrating the filter membrane procedure.
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Hardy's Petri Porter will conveniently transport up to 60 standard Petri plates to and from your incubator or refrigerator to the benchtop.
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| Brainteasers 
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The Reverend Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister, was an avid promoter of veganism and healthy living.
In 1829, he invented graham bread, which was made from unsifted flour and free from chemical additives such as alum and chlorine.
Graham argued that chemical additives in bread made it unwholesome. The use of additives by bakeries was a common practice during the Industrial Revolution to make bread whiter in color, and more commercially appealing.
Darker wheat bread was considered the fare of the lower classes. White bread was a status symbol of the middle class because of its "purity and refinement" in its color and was purchased, rather than home-made.
Graham believed that firm bread made of coarsely ground whole-wheat flour was more nutritious and healthy.
Graham's doctrines found later followers in the persons of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg. Their invention of corn flakes was a logical extension of the Grahamite (as Graham's followers were called) approach to nutrition.
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| Easy ID... StrepPRO 
With StrepPRO you can easily identify Strep Groups A, B, C, D, F, and G within a few minutes. Easy to read results with no cross reactivity. View a short video that explains how easy it is. Order the kit. Components may also be ordered individually.
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All formats available...
Control
Organisms
Hardy offers a complete selection of microorganisms for your QC program. These MBL organisms are licensed derivatives from ATCC. They are available in the swab or pellet format; qualitative or quantitative. Order from Hardy for immediate service and delivery.
View the entire catalog online.
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For growth promotion studies...
EZ Accushot
Do you preform growth promotion studies in your lab? If you do, you will want to try out MBL's EZ Accushot. It provides a known number of bacteria for your growth promotion verification at a reasonable price!
View a short video that explains the advantages.
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Think about it...
* Since light travels faster than sound, isn't that why some people appear bright until you hear them speak?
* Why do banks charge you a "non-sufficient funds fee" on money they already know you don't have?
* Why do you press harder on a remote control when you know the battery is dead?
* Should you trust a stockbroker who's married to a travel agent?
* Do married people live longer than single people, or does it just SEEM longer?
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Save time and money...
Rapid Test Kits
Want to learn how to speed up your identifications?
Hardy offers a 17 page booklet on how to identify bacteria using rapid test methods.
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Lao Tzu
Chinese philosopher and poet from the 5th or 6th century B.C.
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step."
"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."
"Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power."
"To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders."
"Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy."
"An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox."
"He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know."
"Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself."
"He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much."
"If you would take, you must first give, this is the beginning of intelligence."
"Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven."
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I hate Russian dolls
They are so full of
themselves
.
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Want to receive the MicroBytes
Newsletter at home?
Want to view past issues
of MicroBytes?
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QUICK LINKS...
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Micro Musings...
"I know it seems a little over the top, but Weston
has never taken any sick time."
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Fungal creations...
Enjoy some
of nature's art
What created this beautiful pattern?
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Monitoring Toilets
and Cell Phones
These two new unconventional surveillance methods are helping epidemiologists control global disease.
Many infectious diseases such as influenza, rubella, and measles are driven by human population dynamics. Given that the human population is increasing, etiological agents of diseases are infecting at a corresponding rate as well. In addition, the current method of disease surveillance relies heavily on reports produced by physicians or other health professionals who screen infected patients (Gibbons, 2014). These reports are of limited value regarding prevention, since they arrive long after infection has occurred.
Fortunately, research scientists are staying ahead of the curve by using what some may consider unconventional methods -- tracking cell phone global positioning (GPS) data and transportation toilet waste to predict disease patterns. While it may seem like studying cell phone data and screening toilet waste for beta-lactam resistant bacteria using regular surveillance methods are two very different things, the concept behind both methods is the same.
Both methods study an aspect of human population dynamics: human travel. For example, toilet waste on an airplane, train, or cruise ship can tell researchers a lot about what pathogenic bacteria human hosts are carrying and where they are transporting the bugs. Likewise, cell phones can show human mobility data on travel. When paralleled with the incidence of rubella in Kenya, cell phone tracking data matched patterns of rubella outbreaks (Wesolowski, 2015).
Kenya
was a good place to start since 93% of households own a cell phone. Researchers at Princeton and Harvard Universities compared datasets on rubella incidence in Kenya and cell phone data usage for over 15 million anonymous cell phone subscribers for one year, from June 2008 to June 2009. Tracking cell phones allowed researchers to record travel between different Kenyan provinces and view the daily location of each user.
Interestingly, seasonal human travel was highly correlated with seasonal patterns of rubella. University researchers concluded that rubella incidence more commonly occur when children begin to attend school at the end of summer and when children resume school after major holidays. The researchers of the study expressed confidence that tracking cell phone data usage will be a great tool for exploring wide-scale human travel within countries, and may lead to providing effective localized treatment (Wesolowski, 2015). Furthermore, the researchers at Princeton and Harvard hope to expand their study to other diseases driven by population dynamics, such as malaria and cholera.
In a similar fashion, airplane toilet waste is being used as a method of disease surveillance. Researchers at the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark, and DTU Systems Biology conducted a study using septic tanks from 18 aircrafts used for international travel.
Using meta-genomic analysis, the group of researchers generated data using all known antibiotic resistance genes. Moreover, it was found that genes for resistance to beta-lactams, tetracycline, and macrolides were the most common in all the septic tank samples tested (Peterson, 2014).
Furthermore, the study discovered geographical differences in the samples. For example, samples from South Asia and North Asia showed variation in resistance genes detected when compared to one another and when compared to North America. North America showed the greatest abundance of Clostridium difficile. Additionally, the composition of particular microorganisms also varied between continents. For example, South Asia had the least amount of Clostridium species when compared to both North Asia and North America, yet it had the highest incidence of Salmonella enterica (Peterson, 2014). While cell phone data may provide information about disease in a particular country, toilet waste can reveal information about disease transmission on a global scale.
In the near future, these new, and perhaps unconventional, methods of disease surveillance may bring advantages to predicting disease and antibiotic resistance patterns when combined with traditional culture based methods.
By Nasim Delavari
R&D Microbiologist at Hardy Diagnostics
References:
Gibbons, C. L., et al. Burden of Communicable diseases in Europe (BCoDE) consortium. Measuring underreporting and under-ascertainment in infectious disease datasets: a comparison of methods. BMC Public Health 2014; 14: 147 (2014).
Wesolowski, A., et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
.Quantifying seasonal population fluxes driving rubella transmission dynamics using mobile phone data. (2015).
Peterson, T.N. et al. Scientific Reports. Meta-genomic analysis of toilet waste from long distance flights; a step towards global surveillance of infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance. 5: 11444 (2015)
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You can't take it with you...
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There is no
trailer hitch on a hearse.
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Warning:
Pun Zone Ahead
- A Local Area Network in Australia is the LAN down under.
- Did you hear about the short fortune teller who escaped from prison? He was a small medium at large.
- When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
- A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.
- A backwards poet writes inverse.
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"I'm happy when it rains...
because when I'm sad
it rains anyway."
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Do you perform plate counts?
Compact Dry
If you do plate counts
you won't want to miss
this short video!
find out how easy it is...
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Online Ordering Made Easy!
Watch a short video
to learn how easy it is
to order from Hardy on-line!
Pick
. Click. You're Done!
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