Dangers of Multi-Drug Resistant Acinetobacter baumannii in Children

By the bioMérieux Connection Editors In May of this year, the publication of a new study, titled, “Acinetobacter baumannii Resistance Trends in Children in the United States, 1999–2012,” in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, led to a burst of media coverage that no doubt left many young parents uneasy, to say the …

Multi-Drug Resistant E. coli Rampant in Nursing and Long-Term Care Facilities

By the bioMérieux Connection Editors The May 2017 issue of the American Journal of Infection Control contained an eye-opening paper on the incidence of antibiotic resistant pathogens in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. “Prevalence of multidrug-resistant gram-negative bacteria among nursing home residents: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” by Sainfer Aliyu et al., selected 12 …

An Underappreciated Innovation, Zapping Microbes With Lasers Has Helped Identify Pathogens Faster Since 2013

By the bioMérieux Connection Editors In late 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted 510(k) de novo clearance to the first mass spectrometer for identifying disease-causing bacteria and yeast for clinical use in the U.S. market.  The technology is called Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization-Time of Flight mass spectrometry, or MALDI-TOF MS, and it uses a …

As Public STEM Literacy Declines, So Does the Number of Simple Stories in Science

By the bioMérieux Connection Editors While the public rarely notices remarkable medical innovations, why did the overworked and skeptical U.S. healthcare media give wall-to-wall coverage to a theoretical sepsis cure involving vitamin C in a study with fewer than 100 patients?  It took nearly a decade for forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu to finally get the …