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Tagged bacteria, Daily Mail Online, hand dryers, jet air dryers
The Netherlands Nutrition Centre launched a new food safety campaign in November with a little typographic help from bacteria.
For their five educational posters posted across the country, the Centre grew bacteria into the shape of words. Microbial samples from the dishcloths, vegetables and cutting boards of ordinary Dutch kitchens were cultured and photographed for the project.
Foodborne illnesses affect about 700,000 Dutch each year, and the goal of the campaign, entitled “Ziekmakers zie je niet” (“You can’t see what makes you ill”), was to help make invisible bacteria visible to consumers.
Outbreaks of foodborne diseases carried by bacteria can be a nuisance at best, and deadly at worst. Researchers are looking into novel ways to keep food safe. One way to destroy these pathogens is with more pathogens.
Bacteriophages are viruses that specifically attack bacteria. These phages, as researchers call them, have evolved alongside bacteria and become very good at what they do.
Scientists are most interested in lytic phages – viruses that inject their DNA into a bacterium and then hijack the cell’s machinery to make new copies of the virus. The copies eventually burst through bacterium’s membrane, killing it, and attack neighboring cells.
Recently, a team of researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana developed a cocktail of different phages that was extremely effective against Escherichia coli O157:H7, the pathogen that was estimated to have caused more than 63,000 illnesses and 2,138 hospitalizations between 2000 and 2008 in the U.S.
It’s been called public health’s ticking time bomb. Antibiotic resistance—when bacteria don’t respond to the drugs designed to kill them—threatens to return us to the time when simple infections were often fatal. Today, antibiotic resistance annually causes more than 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the United States. Tomorrow, if it continues on its current course, could be even worse:
FoodWorld 