Warning over hospital infection

Warning over hospital infection:
[Via BBC News | Health | World Edition]

Hospitals could face a growing threat from a potentially deadly bacterial infection, warn scientists.

Another antibiotic-resistant bug – Stenotrophomonas maltophilia. Not a big one yet. Britain had only 1000 cases of blood poisoning from this bug last year. But 1/3 were fatal. Not a good average.

Steno does not get passed as easily as Staph but it is a nasty bacteria found on the biofilms seen with respirators, catheters or other pieces of equipment. So it is of particular concern to hospitals.

Steno is an interesting organism. It can grow in media with very high levels of toxic heavy metals.

And, thanks to Open access, you can read the article that just came out describing the genome of this bacterium. Four million base pairs. It possesses a large number of biological pathways that can deal with antibiotics as well as heavy metals.

This antibiotic resistance is intrinsic and is not derived from outside sources, as is often the problem with other bacteria that cause problems in hospitals. Luckily, this bacteria is purely an opportunistic pathogen and is not easily spread. But, the final sentence of the genome paper does make it obvious that we need to keep our eyes on this pathogen.

“We are starting to build up a picture of an organism that is a true opportunist, which, while lacking many conventional key virulence determinants, has nevertheless emerged as a considerable threat.”

Technorati Tags: Health, Science

New ideas for blogs

by eye of einstein

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Enterprise blog channels for communications:
[Via Library clips]

This post is an idea, thinking out loud, something to build upon, or perhaps something that is a bad idea…see what you think.

This is a follow-up to my post, Re-purposing email meme, which explained the email problem (overload, siloed) and how a “re-purposing email” idea with social tools can help reduce the anxiety and act as a catalyst for an open, collaborative, conversational and emergent social enterprise.

One thing to note is that you don’t save or waste time, you spend the same amount of time, only spread across various tools…what you are doing is spending your time more wisely (social productivity).

The focus of a future post will be examples of emails, and in what way they can be re-purposed.

But for now I want to examine exactly how blog communication is going to replace email, except emails for private or sensitive one-to-one correspondence.

This post is only about one type of blog use, and that is “communications“.
This is an In-the-Flow usage scenario as the concept is to use blogs instead of email for something we are already doing…this is not an extra thing we have to do, it’s substituting a tool.
[More]

Another long but interesting post that begins a conversation about uses for blogs that are in the flow. These are business uses that are part of normal daily work. – substituting ‘in the flow’ work using email with ‘in the flow’ work using a blog.

There are some very interesting ideas here since a blog is often seen for ‘out of the flow’ work – comments, ideas, works in progress. While this post is a work in progress and therefore can be seen as out of the flow, it addresses some ideas that could impact in the flow work habits.

Some things to think about.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0