Study: Pediatric healthcare facilities need more staff dedicated to infection prevention

Analysis at one pediatric hospital underscores the complexity of ensuring sufficient attention to infection prevention and control measures to keep patients safer

Association for Professionals in Infection Control

Arlington, Va. — October 17, 2024 — A new paper published today in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC) describes efforts at a major children’s hospital to assess and fulfill its staffing needs for infection prevention and control, highlighting the challenges of allocating sufficient resources to this important role. Infection preventionists (IPs) at Boston Children’s Hospital found that conventional methods for calculating the number of staff for these roles do not accurately reflect the current needs of healthcare systems or the specific needs of a pediatric patient population, and that a new approach is required to ensure patient safety.

While infection prevention is widely regarded as critical for hospitals and other healthcare facilities, properly staffing these roles has long been a challenge, in part because IPs are expected to take on many responsibilities that are not directly associated with infection prevention and control. In a survey conducted by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) in 2020, just 14% of respondents said that their work was fully focused on infection prevention activities. Most respondents were also expected to perform quality improvement, education, and regulatory compliance work in addition to their infection prevention responsibilities.

The conventional approach to calculating IP staffing needs is based on the number of inpatient beds at a hospital, but this method does not take into account key trends in healthcare such as increased outpatient procedures, shorter durations of hospital stays, and more focus on ambulatory services. The need for IPs is likely to be significantly higher than an inpatient-bed-only calculation would suggest.

In their new paper, IPs described a detailed assessment of the infection prevention and control needs at Boston Children’s Hospital, which includes more than 40 different clinical departments and handles more than 47,000 emergency department visits and more than 690,000 ambulatory visits annually, based on data for fiscal year 2021. At the time, hospital IPs were responsible for supporting the main hospital campus, four satellite campuses, four doctor’s offices, and a community health center. The needs assessment focused on time devoted to on-site and off-site responsibilities, as well as an evaluation of ambulatory location complexity.

The complexity variables studied show that work performed by IPs is highly complex, with half of all services evaluated found to have at least one complexity indicator and many having two or more. Based on the estimate of how much time was needed to perform all required tasks, the team found that the hospital was operating at an IP deficit. Their calculation called for 4.5 full-time IPs for the ambulatory and procedural departments, and only two full-time IPs were already on staff in these locations. This finding was presented to hospital leadership, along with a business case for adding more infection prevention and control resources. Approval for new hires was granted, and four additional full-time IPs were added to the staff to increase support for the ambulatory and procedural departments and to add new infection prevention and control and quality improvement capabilities. Beyond highlighting staff shortages, the detailed assessment also allowed department leadership to understand how staff IPs were spending their time and to re-prioritize those responsibilities as needed.

“Our work highlights the complexity and scope of infection prevention and control needs in pediatric ambulatory and procedural settings, areas for which little published infection prevention staffing data exist,” said Lindsay Weir, MPH, CIC, lead infection preventionist at Boston Children’s Hospital and first author of the paper. “We hope that our work helps other infection prevention programs advocate for the critical resources they require to meet the expanding needs of their ambulatory and procedural services. “

Additional details from the study include:

• Complexity variables included factors such as using endoscopes or similar devices, and performing high-level disinfection or sterilization, surgical procedures, and aerosol-generating procedures, among others.
• Complexity was calculated for 237 locations and services, with nearly 80% outside the main hospital campus.
• IPs reported spending the most time on providing consultations, and the least time on professional development and quality improvement projects.
• The assessment focused on the hospital’s current needs, but the authors point out that by the time the analysis was finished, a new satellite location had been opened and plans for a new satellite campus were already underway.

“Across the healthcare landscape, we are seeing shifting patterns in how, where, and for how long patients are treated. All of these changes add to the complexity of determining adequate IP staffing to keep patients safe,” said Tania Bubb, PhD, RN, CIC, FAPIC, 2024 APIC president. “Tools like the APIC IP Staffing Calculator and the assessment described in this paper provide excellent examples of how to successfully make a clear business case for adequate IP resources.”

 

About APIC

Founded in 1972, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) is the leading association for infection preventionists and epidemiologists. With more than 15,000 members, APIC advances the science and practice of infection prevention and control. APIC carries out its mission through research, advocacy, and patient safety; education, credentialing, and certification; and fostering development of the infection prevention and control workforce of the future. Together with our members and partners, we are working toward a safer world through the prevention of infection. Join us and learn more at apic.org.

About AJIC

As the official peer-reviewed journal of APIC, The American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC) is the foremost resource on infection control, epidemiology, infectious diseases, quality management, occupational health, and disease prevention. Published by Elsevier, AJIC also publishes infection control guidelines from APIC and the CDC. AJIC is included in Index Medicus and CINAHL. Visit AJIC at ajicjournal.org.

NOTES FOR EDITORS

“Determining Infection Prevention Staffing Needs for the Pediatric Ambulatory and Procedural Care Setting,” by Lindsay Weir, Jennifer A. Ormsby, Ana M. Vaughan-Malloy, and Celeste Chandonnet, was published online in AJIC on October 17, 2024. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2024.08.011  

AUTHORS

Lindsay Weir, MPH, CIC (corresponding author: Lindsay.Weir@childrens.harvard.edu), Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA

Jennifer A. Ormsby, DNP, RN, CPN, CIC, CPNP-PC, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA

Ana M. Vaughan-Malloy, MD, MPH, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA

Celeste Chandonnet, MSN, RN, CIC, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA

# # #

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Journal

American Journal of Infection Control

DOI

10.1016/j.ajic.2024.08.011 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Determining Infection Prevention Staffing Needs for the Pediatric Ambulatory and Procedural Care Setting

Article Publication Date

17-Oct-2024

COI Statement

Ana M. Vaughan-Malloy: Stock or stock options held by spouse in following: Asana, Aurora, Ayr Wellness, Bionano Genomics, Butterfly Network, Canopy Growth, Cresco Labs, CRISPR Therapeutics, Cronos Group, Curaleaf Holdings, Editas Medicine, Green Thumb Industries, High Tide, Iovance Biotherapeutics, Jushi Holdings, Moderna, Organigram Holdings, Pacific Biosciences of California, Personalis, Pfizer, SNDL, Terrascend, Tilray Brands, Trulieve. Lindsay Weir, Jennifer A. Ormsby, and Celeste Chandonnet: no disclosures.

 

Marine experts challenge reliability of vessel strike prediction models

Heriot-Watt University

 

image: 

Whale breaking the surface of the water.

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Credit: Credit: Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen.

A new study has raised questions about current approaches to predicting the risk of vessel strikes on whales.  

Led by researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, an international team of scientists compared eight models currently in place to assess and forecast the risk of ships colliding with whales. The study reveals notable inconsistencies in the results across the different models. 

Most reports of vessel collisions involve large whales but all species can be affected. Globally, strikes are under-reported and can often go undetected, particularly when they involve large vessels. Collisions can result in animals being injured or killed, and vessels may also sustain substantial damage. 

Approaches for identifying areas of high collision risk have been used by marine managers and policy makers for more than 20 years to try to understand where vessels are more likely to encounter large marine life and explore where it might be most effective to deploy management measures to reduce the risk of fatal collisions. 

Once an area is identified as being of high collision risk, steps such as slowing down vessels and moving them away from areas where there is a high likelihood of them encountering whales are just some of the ways that have been shown to be effective at reducing incidents.

For the first time, this study has considered how using different approaches for evaluating strike risk has consequences for areas identified as high risk. The significance of these findings could hold global implications for the management of vessel traffic.

Emily Hague is the lead author and a researcher from the Institute of Life and Earth Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. 

She said: “In this paper, we looked at the different methods that exist to map collision risk and found that they came up with similar, but fundamentally different, predictions. Some approaches identified the same places as being ‘high risk’, whereas other models identified quite different locations or sizes of areas.

“These methods have previously been seen as interchangeable, which we show is not necessarily the case.”

She continues: “We hope to improve transparency surrounding whale-collision risk mapping, so managers and policymakers know the limitations and strengths of each approach and can consider the best approach and type of data they need for their particular area and requirements.”

“We hope this work can contribute to the body of work that is working towards reducing ship strike to whales, and ultimately aiding their conservation.” 

The paper compares existing methods for predicting vessel strikes including the most-up-to-date techniques.

The team used the same datasets to compare the outputs of each of the different approaches. These included data on the distribution of the whales in the study area and data on the vessels that were present over a comparable period.  

Dr Lauren McWhinnie who is an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University and the project lead, explains why there is a need for accurate modelling. 

“The reality is we’ve got lucky and now have a second chance with these animals after commercial hunting pushed many species to the brink of extinction,” she said.  

“Fortunately, there are many species now showing signs of recovery but our maritime sector has largely evolved without the presence of large whales in any great numbers. This has meant that we are only now starting to understand how these animals might be impacted by human activities such as shipping” 

“In the future, if we want to try and ensure the further recovery of these species, then we need to put in place measures to mitigate against modern-day risks that pose a threat to whale survival. We know that for some populations of whales, vessel strikes are one of the primary threats to their recovery, so we need to be proactive and take the steps needed to protect them.”

The authors highlight the importance of careful consideration when deciding upon which approaches are most appropriate to use for predicting vessel collision risk. These choices, the paper explains, have substantial implications on the areas identified by risk maps and could have subsequent implications for management or policy decisions arising from the results.    

Emily concludes: “It's important that we use the best available data and models so that we can better inform shipping companies how they can minimise the likelihood of colliding with whales.”

Vessel strikes are one of the greatest threats to a whale’s life. With the number of ships rapidly increasing to keep pace with global demand for goods, the issue is only set to get worse. However, there is a growing political willingness to take action to protect the oceans and its habitats, with the UN Ocean Decade underway, and the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) increasingly working with the shipping industry to ensure heavily trafficked areas do not affect large whales. 

The paper, titled: ‘Not all maps are equal: Evaluating approaches for mapping vessel collision risk to large baleen whales’, has been published today (Oct 17) in the Journal of Applied Ecology and is part of a wider four-year project being funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.

It involved contributions from international researchers, scientists and organisations including the Wildlife Conservation Society in Canada, the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, the Department of Geography, Environment, and Geomatics at the University of Ottawa, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Transport Canada, the School of Biological Sciences and School of Geosciences at the University of Aberdeen, the National Decommissioning Centre, and the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria.

Pair of whales pictured from above. 

Whales navigating icy waters. 

Credit

Credit: Fredrik Christiansen

Picture of a whale beneath the surface.

Credit

Credit Fisheries and Oceans Canada

Journal

Journal of Applied Ecology

Article Title

Not all maps are equal: Evaluating approaches for mapping vessel collision risk to large baleen whales

Article Publication Date

17-Oct-2024

 

Financial incentive encourages healthiness: why isn't it used more often?

Radboud University Nijmegen

Move more, quit smoking, lose weight: great resolutions, hard to keep. But does it get easier if there is a financial incentive in return? According to research by Radboud University and others, it can be an effective tool, although there are still some obstacles. They presented their findings this week in Economisch Statistische Berichten (ESB).

Some lifestyle interventions are more effective than others, but in general, financial incentives are a ‘powerful tool to help reduce health inequalities in the Netherlands’, says Koen van der Swaluw of Radboud University. Despite knowing more and more about the effectiveness of financial incentives to promote lifestyle, they are still relatively little used. Health insurer ASR scrapped a reward programme for healthy behaviour earlier this year. Together with colleagues Stefan Lipman (Erasmus University) and David de Buisonjé (Delft University of Technology, Leiden University), Van der Swaluw mapped the barriers to introducing rewards for healthy behaviour.

'Around financial incentives, there are often objections about the limited long-term effects: will someone continue the changed behaviour once the incentive ends? There are opportunities for follow-up research there,' says van der Swaluw. ‘For instance, there have been successful programmes to discourage smoking during pregnancy, programmes that have long-term effects’.

Not opera, but football

ASR changed its rewards programme because mainly active people used it. 'But if you align the rewards with the desires of people who are not yet active, you probably have a better chance. What we see in literature reviews is that rewards do not always match the recipient. Simply put: don't give away tickets to the opera, for example, but to football matches.' Finally, there are often concerns about the cost of financial incentives.

Van der Swaluw and colleagues suggest that financial incentives - like curative care - could be reimbursed from collective health insurance if they prove cost-effective on the basis of a social cost-benefit analysis. Employers could also play a role in encouraging healthy behaviour and assume (part of) the costs.

No panacea

Although the effectiveness of incentives is becoming increasingly clear, they should not be seen as a panacea, according to the researchers. 'In no way are they a replacement for policies aimed at structural aspects of unhealthy behaviour, such as exercise or food supply in the neighbourhood someone lives in, poverty, cultural influences and national or international laws and regulations. Healthy behaviour is and remains a consequence of an interplay of individual behaviour and environmental influences.'

Follow-up research

From November 2024, van der Swaluw and colleagues will start the SPRINTS (‘Sports Pricing Research to INcrease Sport Participation’) project in collaboration with the HAN University of Applied Sciences, among others, investigating how prices influence sports and exercise participation. They previously published a study on rewards for smoking cessation, which appeared in BMC Public Health.

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Article Title

Zet financiële prikkels breder in ter bevordering gezondheid

Article Publication Date

17-Oct-2024

 

People sympathize with bullied AI bots

Imperial College London

In an Imperial College London study, humans displayed sympathy towards and protected AI bots who were excluded from playtime.

The researchers say the study, which used a virtual ball game, highlights humans' tendency to treat AI agents as social beings – an inclination that should be considered when designing AI bots.

The study is published in Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies.

Lead author Jianan Zhou, from Imperial’s Dyson School of Design Engineering, said: “This is a unique insight into how humans interact with AI, with exciting implications for their design and our psychology.”

People are increasingly required to interact with AI virtual agents when accessing services, and many also use them as companions for social interaction. However, these findings suggest that developers should avoid designing agents as overly human-like.

Senior author Dr Nejra van Zalk, also from Imperial’s Dyson School of Design Engineering, said: “A small but increasing body of research shows conflicting findings regarding whether humans treat AI virtual agents as social beings. This raises important questions about how people perceive and interact with these agents.

“Our results show that participants tended to treat AI virtual agents as social beings, because they tried to include them into the ball-tossing game if they felt the AI was being excluded. This is common in human-to-human interactions, and our participants showed the same tendency even though they knew they were tossing a ball to a virtual agent. Interestingly this effect was stronger in the older participants.”

People don’t like ostracism – even toward AI

Feeling empathy and taking corrective action against unfairness is something most humans appear hardwired to do. Prior studies not involving AI found that people tended to compensate ostracised targets by tossing the ball to them more frequently, and that people also tended to dislike the perpetrator of exclusionary behaviour while feeling preference and sympathy towards the target.

To carry out the study, the researchers looked at how 244 human participants responded when they observed an AI virtual agent being excluded from play by another human in a game called 'Cyberball', in which players pass a virtual ball to each other on-screen. The participants were aged between 18 and 62.

In some games, the non-participant human threw the ball a fair number of times to the bot, and in others, the non-participant human blatantly excluded the bot by throwing the ball only to the participant.

Participants were observed and subsequently surveyed for their reactions to test whether they favoured throwing the ball to the bot after it was treated unfairly, and why.

They found that most of the time, the participants tried to rectify the unfairness towards the bot by favouring throwing the ball to the bot. Older participants were more likely to perceive unfairness.

Human caution

The researchers say that as AI virtual agents become more popular in collaborative tasks, increased engagement with humans could increase our familiarity and trigger automatic processing. This would mean users would likely intuitively include virtual agents as real team members and engage with them socially.

This, they say, can be an advantage for work collaboration but might be concerning where virtual agents are used as friends to replace human relationships, or as advisors on physical or mental health.

Jianan said: “By avoiding designing overly human-like agents, developers could help people distinguish between virtual and real interaction. They could also tailor their design for specific age ranges, for example, by accounting for how our varying human characteristics affect our perception.”

The researchers point out that Cyberball might not represent how humans interact in real-life scenarios, which typically occur through written or spoken language with chatbots or voice assistants. This might have conflicted with some participants’ user expectations and raised feelings of strangeness, affecting their responses during the experiment.

Therefore, they are now designing similar experiments using face-to-face conversations with agents in varying contexts such as in the lab or more casual settings. This way, they can test how far their findings extend.

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DOI

10.1155/2024/8864909 

Article Title

Humans Mindlessly Treat AI Virtual Agents as Social Beings, but This Tendency Diminishes Among the Young: Evidence From a Cyberball Experiment

 

Buy your groceries online? Watch out for this food labeling gap

Online grocery shopping has soared in popularity, but new Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy research shows food information—like nutrition facts, ingredients, or allergens—isn’t always accessible to consumers

Tufts University

Picture this: You’re shopping online for this week’s groceries. You try to pick healthy options based on the information provided by the online retailer. You can tell that the products you’re choosing are organic, non-GMO, or Fair Trade Certified. But in many cases, you can’t find the nutrition facts, ingredient list, or even a list of allergens.

A new, comprehensive study of online grocery retailers shows this problem is pervasive, to the detriment of public health and safety in the U.S. The study, led by researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and published in Public Health Nutrition on Oct. 17, shows a lack of present, accessible, and legible information about the food consumers buy, while marketing claims are still prominent. The absence of accessible food labeling has tangible consequences for public health, said Julia Sharib, first author on the study and manager of research and communications for the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School.

“The government has clearly intended that you should be able to know certain things about your food,” said Sean Cash, Bergstrom Foundation Professor in Global Nutrition at the Friedman School and senior author on the study. “The way we’ve regulated that in the United States is to put that information on the packaging. But that hasn’t carried over to online spaces very well.”

A Lack of Information

Cash and researchers at the Friedman School and New York University (NYU) first identified the lack of accessible food labeling among online retailers in a 2022 pilot study of 10 food products across nine online grocery retailers. That study found that information required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about food, such as nutrition facts, an ingredient list, and an allergen list were often absent, and were less present than marketing claims.

The lack of information accessible in online settings reveals a “major gap” in federal regulations, Cash said. While food manufacturers are required by the FDA to present certain information on food packaging, online grocery retailers aren’t required to reproduce that information on their websites. That means that consumers won’t necessarily be able to access information about calories, nutrition content, or allergens when buying their groceries online.

Since 2022, there were some reasons to think that retailers would step up their game. First, online grocery shopping is here to stay—recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) indicates that 20% of Americans buy their groceries online, while over 80% have done so in the past three years. The trend has been aided by a drop in online food prices relative to in-store shopping: Prices are now roughly comparable between in-store and online groceries, which hasn’t always been the case.

Second, online food retailers could have responded to the growing market by deciding to get out ahead of any regulatory action. “We thought there might be practical changes in what food retailers are doing,” Cash said.

There have been signs that the FDA is considering regulatory action, too. In 2023, the agency issued a request for information on food labeling in online grocery shopping, citing previous research from Cash and his colleagues as one basis of their request. “We, and others, have been pushing for change,” Cash said. But the agency has not yet taken regulatory action to close the gap.

The new study, with co-authors Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at the NYU School of Global Public Health, and Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute and Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School, gives a more complete look at the issue and analyzes 60 food products across 10 different online grocery retailers. The food products were chosen to represent the typical range of food commonly sold at supermarkets, based on a formula used by the USDA for administering food assistance programs. The results show the trend has persisted: Each FDA-required label was present, accessible, and legible for just 35.1% of products.

Marketing claims and labels, though, were present for 83.7% of products. That’s what Cash finds unpalatable. “It’s far easier to find marketing that’s trying to sell you the food rather than the information that our society agrees should be there to tell you about your food,” he said.

“We saw many cases in which a nutrition facts label, for example, was only accessible after scrolling through a dozen marketing images, essentially forcing any consumers seeking that label to interact with marketing language,” Sharib said.

Making Shopping More Accessible

Studies show that population health is better when ingredient lists and nutrition facts are provided. When consumers can’t access that information, retailers “run the risk of perpetuating consumer’s incorrect understandings about the healthfulness of the foods they buy,” Sharib said.

Additionally, plenty of Americans follow specific diets meant to control certain health conditions and may be looking for foods with a specific nutrition content. “For example, if you’re worried about sodium intake because you have hypertension, food labeling is something that can be a very important part of your life,” Cash said. For people with specific allergies, a lack of food labeling can be dangerous, too.

The best way consumers can get the FDA-required information is to visit the websites of the food manufacturers themselves, Cash said. On those sites, nutrition information and ingredient lists are much more likely to be present and legible. Cash cautions that food labeling found in product reviews can be helpful, but may also be out of date or inaccurate.

And ultimately, the onus should be on regulators and the industry to provide important information to consumers, Cash said. “Putting the burden on consumers is not what we should be doing,” he said.

There are a few solutions: First, regulators or congress could pass new laws or issue new regulations to compel food retailers to make food labeling accessible. Second, the U.S. government could help online retailers to make food labeling accessible by providing a public database of nutrition, ingredient, and allergen information of packaged foods, Cash said.

“We simply cannot continue to let this sector grow without modern regulation,” Sharib said.

 

Research reported in this article was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health under award R01HL115189. Complete information on authors, funders, and conflicts of interest is available in the published paper. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funders.

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Journal

Public Health Nutrition

DOI

10.1017/S1368980024001289 

Article Publication Date

17-Oct-2024

 

City microbes surviving on disinfectants, research reveals

New research shows microbes in our cities are evolving to resist the very cleaners we use to eliminate them. It also identifies novel strains living in Hong Kong that were previously only found in Antarctic desert soil.

Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

 

image: 

The Human Microbiome Project, which was launched by NIH in 2007, provided the first glimpse of the microbial diversity of healthy humans and is exploring the possible relationships between particular human diseases and the microbiome. (Clockwise from top left): Streptococcus (Credit: Tom Schmidt); microbial biofilm, of mixed species, from the human body (credit: A. Earl, Broad Institute/MIT); Bacillus (Credit: Tom Schmid); Malassezia lopophilis (Credit: J.H, CDC).
 

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Credit: For composite image: Jonathan Bailey, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH

After the recent pandemic, our use of disinfectants has increased, but are our efforts to create sterile urban environments backfiring?

A new study published in the journal Microbiome has identified novel strains of microbes that have adapted to use the limited resources available in cities and shown that our everyday behaviour is changing the makeup of microorganisms in indoor environments.

“Built environments offer distinct conditions that set them apart from natural and engineered habitats,” says Dr Xinzhao Tong, an assistant professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), China, and lead author of the study.

“Areas with many buildings are low in the traditional nutrients and essential resources microbes need for survival, so these built environments have a unique microbiome.

“Our use of cleaning and other manufactured products creates a unique setting that puts selective pressures on microbes, which they must adapt to or be eliminated, but the mechanisms by which microbes adapt and survive in built environments are poorly understood,” Dr Tong explains.

City dwellers

The researchers collected 738 samples from a variety of built environments, including subways, residences, public facilities, piers and human skin in Hong Kong. They then used shotgun metagenomic sequencing to analyse the microbes’ genomic content and understand how they have adapted to the challenging urban conditions.

The team identified 363 microbial strains that have not been previously identified that live on our skin and the environment around us. Some of these strains’ genomes contained genes for metabolising manufactured products found in cities and using them as carbon and energy sources. This includes the discovery of a strain of Candidatus phylum Eremiobacterota, previously only reported in Antarctic desert soil.

Dr Tong says: “The genome of this novel strain of Eremiobacterota enables it to metabolise ammonium ions found in cleaning products. The strain also has genes for alcohol and aldehyde dehydrogenases to break down residual alcohol found in common disinfectants.

“Microbes possessing enhanced capabilities to utilise limited resources and tolerate manufactured products, such as disinfectants and metals, out-compete non-resistant strains, enhancing their survival and even evolution within built environments. They could, therefore, pose health risks if they are pathogenic.”

The team identified 11 unique, previously uncharacterised strains of Micrococcus luteus, typically non-pathogenic but capable of causing opportunistic infections in immunocompromised individuals.

“The issue of their adaptation to our behaviour becomes particularly critical in clinical settings where hospitals serve as hotspots for diverse pathogens that cause hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). HAIs pose a significant threat, particularly in intensive care units where mortality rates can reach up to 30%,” says Dr Tong.

A balancing act

The researchers also characterised two novel strains of Patescibacteria, known as “nanobacteria”, as they have tiny genomes that do not contain many genes for producing their own resources.

Dr Tong says: “Some strains of Patescibacteria are considered parasitic as they rely on bacterial hosts to supply their nutrients. However, in this study, the researchers found that one of the nanobacteria strains, recovered from human skin, contains genes for the biosynthesis of carotenoids and ubiquinone. These antioxidant compounds are vital to humans, and we typically acquire them, especially carotenoids, through our diets, suggesting a possible mutualistic relationship between bacteria and us as their hosts.”

This enhanced understanding of microbial metabolic functions within built environments helps develop strategies to create a healthy indoor ecosystem of microbes for us to live alongside.

The team is now investigating the transmission and evolution of resistance in pathogenic microbes in intensive care units that are exposed to stringent and extensive disinfectant practices. They hope to improve infection control practices and increase the safety of clinical environments for healthcare workers and patients.

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Journal

Microbiome

DOI

10.1186/s40168-024-01926-6 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Article Title

Diverse and specialized metabolic capabilities of microbes in oligotrophic built environments

Article Publication Date

17-Oct-2024

 

Mangrove microbes to munch on plastic

King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST)

 

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Mangrove soils contain bacteria with PET-degrading enzymes capable of breaking down and transforming plastic. 

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Credit: © 2024 KAUST.

A way to select a suite of mangrove bacteria that can transform plastic has been developed that potentially offers a new strategy in the global toolkit of plastic waste cleanup. Researchers have assessed the impact of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) particles and seawater intrusion on the microbiome of mangrove soil and then experimented with an enrichment culture to select a suite of PET-transforming microbes[1].

Plastic ocean pollution is growing globally at an alarming rate, with plastic fragments found even in deep oceans far from from human habitation. Mangroves are important biodiversity hotspots that offer a range of ecosystem services but are increasingly at risk from many stressors including plastic pollution.

“Mangrove ecosystems are exposed to high levels of plastic and their soils have been reported to contain diverse microbial communities including plastic-active microorganisms,” explains Diego Javier Jiménez Avella, a research scientist in the Microbial EcoGenomics and Biotechnology Laboratory (MEGBLab) at KAUST, who led this research project. “So we thought these soils could be a good source of microbes with potential for breaking down plastics. Yet microbial diversity and metabolic activities in mangrove soils are still largely unknown.”

Analyzing the collective genomic information of two bacterial consortia showed that some bacterial species have novel enzymes capable of breaking down and transforming PET. The novel bacterial genus Mangrovimarina plasticivorans is a particularly important member of these consortia as it carries two genes that code synthesis of monohydroxyethyl terephthalates hydrolases — enzymes that are capable of degrading a PET byproduct.

These results are important as they increase our ecological understanding of PET transformation in nature and describe a novel bacterial genus and enzymes potentially capable of degrading PET. This is also the first time researchers have demonstrated that a bacterial consortia derived from mangrove soils can transform a fossil-fuel-based hydrolysable plastic.

“Engineering microbiomes to effectively transform plastics is an exciting research theme in microbiology and biotechnology,” explains Jiménez. “It is also a daunting task: bioremediation of microplastics in natural marine ecosystems is challenging due to low effectiveness, problems with scalability, testing, implementation, evaluation and legislation.”

The team’s approach to designing microbial inoculants and/or enzyme cocktails capable of accelerating PET degradation could be broadly applied using microbial inocula from a range of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. This in turn could identify more novel plastic-degrading microbes or enzymes. 

“These laboratory-scale findings are a step to addressing plastic pollution and require further research and development — such as optimization and scalability — before they can be practically applied,” notes Alexandre S. Rosado, principal investigator at KAUST and leader of the MEGBLab.

Led by KAUST scientists, the research team — a collaboration that began in 2021 with eight institutions in Colombia, Brazil, USA, Germany, Australia, U.K. and Saudi Arabia — anticipates that broad use of this approach could help the design of efficient microbial consortia targeting plastic transformation both in the laboratory and in large-scale industrial settings.

The team are continuing to investigate the selection of plastic-transforming microbial communities from Red Sea mangroves and enzymatic activity of putative novel PET-degrading enzymes found in this study.

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Journal

Trends in Biotechnology

DOI

10.1016/j.tibtech.2024.08.013 

Article Title

Engineering the mangrove soil microbiome for selection of polyethylene terephthalate-transforming bacterial consortia