"A liverwurst sandwich with mustard is quite possibly the perfect lunch for me. It tastes somewhere between bologna and bacon."

"It's just such a rich flavor … the texture is great, too."

Said one admirer of liverwurst, perhaps liverwurst's biggest fan, quoted in "Boar's Head ditches liverwurst, a once-popular sandwich staple that Americans no longer stomach/Liverwurst is dropped from product line in wake of product recall and declining popularity" (Fox News).

Boar's Head discovered — so luckily — that its listeria problem was entirely located within a facility that made liverwurst, the product no one liked anyway.

Kind of makes you wonder how anyone got infected, but obviously some people were clinging to liverwurst. 

"The ways you can get infected with this bacteria are, one, you can eat something that’s contaminated with it [and] the other way is by having a cut or tattoo exposed to water in which this bug lives."

From "California mom had all of her limbs amputated after consuming bad tilapia: 'She almost lost her life'" (NY Post).

The bacteria is Vibrio Vulnificus, and here's a link to an article from last month, "New York State Department releases guidance after 3 dead from flesh-eating bacteria in New York, Connecticut." 

I think the problem with swimming and tattoos refers only to recent tattoos, in their healing phase. It would be quite something if getting tattooed represented a decision never to go swimming again. 

Meanwhile, the woman who lost all her limbs merely encountered fish, and it's not enough to avoid eating raw or undercooked fish. You have to worry about handling raw fish. Wear gloves.

"The F.D.A. said it expected Abbott to restart [infant formula] production in about two weeks... at the plant in Sturgis, Mich."

"It has been shut down since February after several babies who had consumed formula that had been produced there fell ill and two died. The agreement stems from a U.S. Department of Justice complaint and consent decree with the company and three of its executives. Those court records say the F.D.A. found a deadly bacteria, called cronobacter, in the plant in February and the company found more tranches of the bacteria later that month. According to the complaint, the same Sturgis factory had also produced two batches of formula in the summer of 2019 and 2020 on different production equipment that tested positive for the bacteria. Abbott staff 'have been unwilling or unable to implement sustainable corrective actions to ensure the safety and quality of food manufactured for infants,' leading to the need for legal action, the documents state. In a release, Abbott said 'there is no conclusive evidence to link Abbott’s formulas to these infant illnesses.'" 

"F.D.A. and Abbott Reach Agreement on Baby Formula to Try to Ease Shortage/The company said production could resume in about 2 weeks and store shelves would be restocked several weeks later" (NYT).

Here's the Wikipedia article on cronobacter: 

Cronobacter was first proposed as a new genus in 2007 as a clarification of the taxonomic relationship of the biogroups found among strains of Enterobacter sakazakii.... 

Cronobacter (Cro.no.bac'ter) is from the Greek noun Cronos (Κρόνος), one of the Titans of mythology, who swallowed each of his children as soon as they were born, and the New Latin masculine noun bacter, a rod, resulting in the N.L. masc. n. Cronobacter, a rod that can cause illness in neonates.

"David Whitlock has not showered or bathed for 15 years, yet he does not have body odour."

"'It was kind of strange for the first few months, but after that I stopped missing it,' he says. 'If I get a specific part of my body dirty, then I’ll wash that specific part' – but never with soap. As well as germs, soap gets rid of the skin’s protective oils and alters its pH level.... For Whitlock, a former chemical engineer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not washing has been a serious science experiment, the success of which has led him to become a trailblazer in a skincare revolution in soap-free, microbiome-friendly and probiotic products. His inspiration came from researching why horses roll in dirt. His conclusion? To top up their ammonia-metabilising bacteria, making the skin less susceptible to infection. Whitlock had hoped that he would naturally acquire this type of bacteria simply by stopping washing. He didn’t – and grew quite pongy. So, he harvested bacteria from the soil at a local farm and fed them with ammonia and minerals. When they turned the ammonia into nitrate, he knew he had what he wanted and started narrowing them down to a single strain that seemed happiest on human skin. After he applied the bacteria he had cultured – the stuff the horses were apparently after – he stopped smelling."

From "'I don’t smell!' Meet the people who have stopped washing/A growing number of people are eschewing soap and trusting bacteria to do the job instead – and an entire industry has sprung up to accommodate them" (The Guardian).

That made me want to copy a passage from Bill Bryson's "At Home: A Short History of Private Life":

“Wash your hands often, your feet seldom, and your head never” was a common English proverb. Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month “whether she needs it or no.”... In France, King Louis XIII went unbathed until almost his seventh birthday, in 1608....  The aristocratic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was one of the first great female travelers, was so grubby that after shaking her hand a new acquaintance blurted out in amazement how dirty it was. “What would you say if you saw my feet?” Lady Mary responded brightly. Many people grew so unused to being exposed to water in quantity that the very prospect of it left them genuinely fearful. When Henry Drinker, a prominent Philadelphian, installed a shower in his garden as late as 1798, his wife Elizabeth put off trying it out for over a year, “not having been wett all over at once, for 28 years past,” she explained.

The Turtle House.

That's The Turtle house by Kurt Völtzke at El Gouna (Red Sea, Egypt), which I'm seeing this morning at the Wikipedia article "Cultural depictions of turtles." I got there because, after blogging about the Green Reaper, I went looking for other government-designed mascots. I'd thought of Smokey the Bear on my own, but that's the one that seems to make us think that the government should be in the mascot-designing business. I found a WaPo article from 2014, "It’s (almost) Smokey Bear’s birthday. Here are some other decidedly less iconic government mascots." There I discovered a Federal Trade Commission atrocity called Dewie the E-Turtle, which was supposed to teach us about protecting our privacy on the internet. That got my attention because I believed the green thing in this photograph was Dewey:



I was wrong about that. The green thing is actually BAC, a creation of the Department of Agriculture. He's a bacterium, which explains the other mascot, which is Thermy, who's there to bully you into overcooking your meat. But I'm only figuring that out now, after I've become entranced by "The Cultural Depiction of Turtles." I love Wikipedia.

"Symbiotic relationships, both parasitic and mutualistic, are ubiquitous in nature."

"Understanding how these symbioses evolve, from bacteria and their phages to humans and our gut microflora, is crucial in understanding how life operates. Often, symbioses consist of a slowly evolving host species with each host only interacting with its own sub-population of symbionts. The Red Queen hypothesis describes coevolutionary relationships as constant arms races with each species rushing to evolve an advantage over the other, suggesting that faster evolution is favored. Here, we use a simple game theoretic model of host-symbiont coevolution that includes population structure to show that if the symbionts evolve much faster than the host, the equilibrium distribution is the same as it would be if it were a sequential game where the host moves first against its symbionts."

He's talking about Google, right? 

(I'm trying to understand James Damore — not just why he was fired, but why he was hired.)

"After the entire movie had been inserted into the genome, the authors boiled the cells to extract the DNA and then sequenced the regions where they thought the encoded movie frames would be."

"After running the extracted sequences through a computer program, the team found they were able to play back their movie with 90% accuracy.... 'If there was a fitness cost [to the bacteria], you would imagine the information would be lost over time, but it doesn’t seem to cost the cell anything to have it'.... Encoding a short movie into cellular DNA is a neat trick, but Shipman said the work only represents a stepping stone toward his ultimate goal — building tiny biological recorders that can capture and store what is going on in a cell or in its environment. For example, Shipman is interested in learning what causes developing brain cells, which all look the same, to mature into one type of neuron or another. 'There are certain places we can’t go that a cell can go... The brain is locked away inside the skull, and these changes happen rapidly and all at the same time.'"

From "Who needs film when you can store a movie in bacteria DNA?" (in The L.A. Times).

Well, speaking of movies, this would be a good beginning for a science fiction movie. I like the idea of having the gung-ho scientist saying, "There are certain places we can’t go that a cell can go," and the more cautious scientist musing that There are certain places where we are not meant to go. That's all I've got so far, that and an idea for a name for one of the scientists, the female (who should be the gung-ho one): Edna.

Bacteria in the gut, causing bubbles in the brain that may burst at any time, causing a stroke.

"The new study, published on Wednesday in Nature, is among the first to suggest convincingly that these bacteria may initiate disease in seemingly unrelated organs, and in completely unexpected ways."

Researchers “need to be thinking more broadly about the indirect role of the microbiome” in influencing even diseases that have no obvious link to the gut, said Dr. David Relman, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford.

"Not only do bacteria outnumber humans but they outweigh us, too, by a factor of a hundred million."

"Civilization is only a tweak to their landscape. 'If Homo sapiens disappears, cities will be gone and fields will become rain forest again, but life as such will not change,' [Slava] Epstein told me. 'If microbes disappear, then everything is gone—no New York, no rain forest.'"

From a great New Yorker article by Raffi Khatchadourian called "THE UNSEEN/Millions of microbes are yet to be discovered. Will one hold the ultimate cure?"

I was listening to the audio version as I was walking today, and I gasped aloud when I heard "a factor of a hundred million." And I cried over Epstein's struggle to become a microbiologist in the Soviet Union....

Through a friend, Epstein found a job... in Kamchatka, where he manned a lone microbial-research station on the Bering Sea. He hiked. He avoided bears. And, dreaming of exile, he memorized seven thousand English words from an old dictionary, with no sense of how they fit together.

... and then, relocated to America...

... with his limited English, reëntering academia was impossible at first, and he half-considered becoming a contractor. While fixing driveways, he listened to NPR, the language flowing by in an undifferentiated stream. Over time, the words revealed themselves, until one day he realized that he was listening to the news.

And then there's the prediction of a “post-antibiotic world”...

[I]f trends continue, annual fatalities from drug-resistant microbes could exceed ten million by 2050, eclipsing those from cancer. Many key advancements in modern medicine could be reversed. As one researcher noted recently, “A lot of major surgery would be seriously threatened. I used to show students pictures of people being treated for tuberculosis in London. It was just a row of beds outside a hospital—you lived or you died.”

"Understanding this holds the promise of enhancing climate models' accuracy."

"This" = "the most abundant organism at the ocean's surface... involved in an integral process that helps regulate our climate – the production of dimethylsulfide (DMS)."

[I]f Pelagibacterales are such simple organisms, and so abundant, why has this pathway remained hidden until now, awaiting accidental discovery? The answer, ironic though it may appear, lies in their very simplicity, evolved over as much as a billion years into "streamlined cells," honing their role into something small and specific, and discarding unnecessary genes along the way....

Elizabethkingia in Wisconsin.

"Since November 2015... Elizabethkingia anophelis, has caused blood infections in 48 people in Wisconsin, 15 of whom have died."

It's a type of gram-negative bacteria found commonly in the environment, but only rarely causes disease in humans.... Most of the victims have been older than 65, and all were dealing with a serious illness of some kind at the time....

Over a typical year, health officials generally report a half dozen or more Elizabethkingia infections in each state, [said Michael Bell, deputy director for the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta].... "We don't see 48 of the identical organism causing an outbreak like this very often," he said. "In fact, this is probably the largest one we've seen.... The fact that they all have one fingerprint makes us think that it could be one isolated source."

"But before he replaced the 'bone flap'—the section of skull that is removed to allow access to the brain—he soaked it for an hour in a solution teeming with Enterobacter aerogenes, a common fecal bacterium."

"Then he reattached it to Egan’s skull, using tiny metal plates and screws. Muizelaar hoped that inside Egan’s brain an infection was brewing.... The surgeons had no data to suggest what might constitute a therapeutic dose of Enterobacter, or a safe delivery method. The procedure was heretical in principle: deliberately exposing a patient to bacteria in the operating room violated a basic tenet of modern surgery.... For four weeks, Egan lay in intensive care, most of the time in a coma. Then, on the afternoon of November 10th, Muizelaar learned that a scan of Egan’s brain had failed to pick up the distinctive signature of glioblastoma. The pattern on the scan suggested that the tumor had been replaced by an abscess—an infection—precisely as the surgeons had intended...."

From "Bacteria on the Brain/A brilliant surgeon offered an untested treatment to dying patients. Was it innovation or overreach?"

"Should We Bank Our Own Stool?"

The question everyone is asking.

"Microbiologist Takes Handprint of Her Son After Playing Outside and Incubates the Results."

Amazing and beautiful.

And for some reason it reminded me that I wanted to blog "I rediscovered my Jurassic Park dossier when cleaning out a cupboard... "

"Teenage American Civil War buff Bill Martin was fascinated by a legend of soldiers at the battle of Shiloh whose wounds glowed an eerie blue-green at night..."

"... and who subsequently had better recoveries, a phenomenon dubbed 'the angel's glow.' He knew from his microbiologist mom's work that some soil bacteria were bioluminescent, and wondered if there could be a connection. Turns out, yes there probably was!"

"Seventy percent of the world is coated with goo."

"At the very top of oceans and inland waters lies a distinct micrometer-thick microbial habitat. It influences climate change, fosters unusual and deadly bacteria, and is made of jelly. It is the surface microlayer."

"Could there be a kind of 'good' bacteria in the dirt that fed off perspiration?"

"He knew there was a class of bacteria that derive their energy from ammonia rather than from carbon and grew convinced that horses (and possibly other mammals that engage in dirt bathing) would be covered in them. 'The only way that horses could evolve this behavior was if they had substantial evolutionary benefits from it,' he told me. Whitlock gathered his samples and brought them back to his makeshift home laboratory, where he skimmed off the dirt and grew the bacteria in an ammonia solution (to simulate sweat). The strain that emerged as the hardiest was indeed an ammonia oxidizer: N. eutropha. Here was one way to test his 'clean dirt theory': Whitlock put the bacteria in water and dumped them onto his head and body."

Whitlock = "David Whitlock, the M.I.T.-trained chemical engineer who invented AO+. He has not showered for the past 12 years."

Bubonic plague death.

From eating infected marmot.

Want to do it like a Mycobacterium smegmatis?

It's not sex. It's "conjugal transfer," which "produces just as much genetic diversity as sexual reproduction."

"The doctors told a story of a married man who got a transplant, and whose wife had a parrot."

"They told them the parrot had to go. The wife refused. The guy caught an avian infection and died after going home. I don't know if that was premeditated or not, but the story sent home the message. So, I had all my bird stuff taken down and cleaned up, and I avoided gardening and playing in my pond for a while...."

Also: "While we are on the subject of grossity and contact with it, I have a suggestion for dog owners...."

AND: Thanks to bagoh20 for the parrot story. Click on the link for the whole thing.