Book Review:”Let Them Eat Dirt” – Save Your Child by Saving Their Microbes!

Book Review:”Let Them Eat Dirt” – Save Your Child by Saving Their Microbes!

  “Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World” provides suggestions for a microbially rich and healthy childhood. Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World talks directly to parents about the importance of microbes to your young kids. Authors  Brett Finlay, PhD and Marie-Claire Arrieta, PhD have an excellent message – let kids get dirty and quit abusing antibiotics. Let Them Eat Dirt is an engaging read clearly written and written clearly by scientist parents who have been in the “parenting trenches”. This microbiome parenting book is a fun read. Several times I laughed out loud at the references to pregnancy and parenting woes. As a scientist, I appreciated their overall message about the importance of microbes to our health.

“Gut Check:The Microbiome Game” the Reprinting!

“Gut Check:The Microbiome Game” the Reprinting!

Professionally printed version of Gut Check:The Microbiome Game available as a promotion for a limited time from Qiagen. Fecal transplant? Plasmids? Nosocomial Infections? Microbiome? Whether you’re teaching microbiology or just interested in a fun, biologically correct game for family game night, Gut Check is your game. Available for a year or so as a PDF printable, Gut Check has been revised and as is available for purchase through MOBIO for a limited time. >UPDATED 5/6/21 – Pre-printed copies of Gut Check are offered as promotional material from Qiagen. Please see the PDF printable link if you would like to download and print your own copy!< Gut Check: The Microbiome Game Overview For the uninitiated  uncolonized, Gut Check is a board game about the microbes living in your gut and how different life events affect the microbes and your health. I reviewed the game in 2015, so check that post for details. In summary, players start with a positive gut score and attempt to build their beneficial microbiome and reap its benefits while avoiding antibiotics and pathogens. Events in the game include everything from bus trips and going to work sick to eating veggie-filled pizza and synthesizing vitamins. Antibiotics and antibiotic resistance

FDA Bans Antiseptics: One Small Step for Bacteria and Humankind

FDA Bans Antiseptics: One Small Step for Bacteria and Humankind

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned 19 antiseptic chemicals from over-the-counter soaps, hand and body washes. Citing concerns over long-term human safety and increased selection for antibiotic resistance, the FDA banned antiseptic chemicals on September 2, 2016. Antimicrobial washes also didn’t perform better than standard soap and water [1, 2]. Despite these findings and concerns, toothpaste, “First aid antiseptics”, antiseptic wipes, health care antiseptics, consumer antiseptic rubs, or antiseptics used by food industry CAN continue to use these 19 antiseptic chemicals [3-5]. Triclosan and triclocarban found in products including mouthwash, toothpaste, soaps, shoes, and toys, are two well-known antibiotics now banned from use in washes.

Book Review: Multitudes of Praises for Ed Yong’s “I Contain Multitudes”

Book Review: Multitudes of Praises for Ed Yong’s “I Contain Multitudes”

Ed Yong‘s I Contain Multitudes gives you the secret tour of the amazing world of beneficial microbial-host interactions and the passionate, quirky scientists driving the work. The importance of microbes to humans hit the media with a superhero-sized *TWACK* 5 to 7 years ago, when data from the Human Microbiome Project began to be published. Since then, the human microbiome has been implicated in everything from obesity and diabetes to anxiety and autism. Scores of books, good and not so, have been written in these early years of the microbiome, yet they all focus on the HUMAN microbiome. As a science blogger for National Geographic and writer for The Atlantic, Ed became engrossed with microbial-host interactions. If you’ve read a recent article on the human microbiome, chances are it was one of his. Here’s the secret  – people have been studying microbial-host interactions in insects, squid, plants, lichens, corals, and other mammals – for centuries! We often know MORE about how these other microbes interact with their hosts during development, on a molecular, cellular, ecological, and evolutionary aspect than we do with human-microbe interactions. In fact, it’s this amazing field of non-human-microbe interactions that is the foundation the human microbiome work often

The National Microbiome Initiative: A lucky day for all

The National Microbiome Initiative: A lucky day for all

Friday the 13th, 2016 was a lucky day for the field of microbiome science, human and environmental health. The National Microbiome Initiative (NMI) launched with more than $121 million being invested from U.S. Federal agencies into microbiome research. We are realizing that microbial ecology really runs our world and lives. So the NMI seeks to understand how microorganisms interact with other species and the environment to protect and restore healthy microbiomes.