Candida auris - New superbug in US

Just five months after federal health officials asked hospitals and physicians to be on the lookout for an often-fatal, antibiotic-resistant fungus called Candida auris, 13 cases have been reported, the CDC announced 4 November, 2016.

It is the first time that the fungus, which is easily misidentified in lab tests as a more common candida yeast infection, has been found in the USA, and four of the first seven patients with it have died.

Candida auris’s emergence and apparent global spread, it was first identified in Japan in 2009 and since then has been found in a dozen countries on four continents, put the pathogen on the ever-growing list of superbugs, disease-causing microbes that are resistant to many and, in some cases, all antibiotics.

C. auris is difficult to identify with standard laboratory methods and can be misidentified in labs without specific technology. CDC encourages all U.S. laboratory staff who identify C. auris strains to notify their state or local public health authorities and CDC at candidaauris@cdc.gov. Find answers to frequently asked questions about C. auris on our questions and answers page and in the Candida auris: Interim Recommendations.

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Health officials find first cases of new superbug in USMore information:
Candida auris | Fungal Diseases | CDC

Source: CDC

A lot of blood, for no reason?

Curbing genetic testing for clot-prone patients is just one example of how to improve spending of health care dollars through better ordering of tests. A half billion dollars, at least, gets spent each year on blood tests to see which hospital patients have a genetic quirk that makes their blood more likely to form dangerous clots.

Writing in the Journal of Hospital Medicine , they review what’s known about testing for the trait called inherited thrombophilia, and call for a drastic cut in the test’s use by doctors across America.

After all, they write, hospitalized people who have already had such dangerous clots, called venous thromboembolisms or VTEs, don’t need a positive genetic test to justify taking medication and making other changes to prevent future ones.

And there’s no evidence that medication to prevent clots will help hospital patients who haven’t yet had a VTE. Testing their DNA for inherited thrombophilia won’t change that.

In other words, the authors say, ordering inherited thromboembolism testing on inpatients is something doctors do for little or no reason. And according to the team’s analysis of data pulled from medical records, they do it hundreds of thousands of times a year in Medicare patients alone.

Can we call this predictive, preventive and personalised laboratory medicine?

Read more:
A lot of blood, for no reason? U-M team concludes that common, costly clot test has few benefits | University of Michigan Health System

 Source: University of Michigan Health System

World Congress of Biomedical Laboratory Science 2018

The 33rd World Congress of Biomedical Laboratory Science will be held on 22-26 September 2018, Firenze, Italy.

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IFBLS, World Congress

Source:   IFBLS

Exercise for scientists

How do you build your muscle?


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Sketching Science

Source: Facebook via sketching Scinece

Blood type compatibility chart

All you need to know blood types and to whom you can donate


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Blood type compatibility chart



Source:  You Tube Life at Civil Engineering

Lab Halloween Pumpkin

The rules were simple: collect a pumpkin from the cafeteria, carve it and return the carved pumpkin for a chance to win a pizza party! Sweet. I had not seen the winners either of the previous years so I was not entirely sure what we were up against. We decided to make our pumpkins work related: Heather make a DNA pumpkin and I made a microscope with some differently shaped bacteria.

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Pumpkin Carving Contest

Source: No meat no meal

All you need is microbiology

E. coli on EMB media


Photo By: Madiha Tariq from Rawalpindi, Pakistan.