Infectious diseases

Background: Within six weeks of the first case of COVID-19 in early Dec 2019 in Wuhan, China, the pandemic had already a foothold half-way around the world in Washington State, where the the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed on 20 Jan 2020 in a traveler returning from the index city.

I led a project with the Woodland Park Zoo’s Senior Conservation Scientist, Dr. Lisa Dabek, and Director of the UW Center for One Health Research, Dr. Peter Rabinowitz.

Wastewater surveillance has long been used to aid the global public health effort to eradicate poliovirus. More recently, wastewater surveillance has been implemented to help understand the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Shortly after it was discovered to be shed in stools, the virus was detected in sewage around the world.

Wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 provides an approach for assessing theinfection burden across a sewer service area. For these data to be useful for public health, measurement variability in relation to normalization methods need to be established.

Introduction: Infection control is important in the veterinary care setting due to the risk of zoonotic illness1–4, however research has consistently shown that veterinary workers tend to underestimate their risk and have lower rates of proper personal protective equipment (PPE) use5–9.

Staphylococcus aureus are both human commensal bacteria and potential pathogens. The aim of this study was to isolate and characterize methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) from coastal beach and river waters, anchialine pools, sand, and wastewater on the Island of Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi.

Exposure to zoonotic disease is a significant occupational risk in veterinary medicine. In this study, we characterized PPE use, injury frequency, and Bartonella seroreactivity in Washington State veterinary workers.

Workers who come into contact with tuberculosis (TB) patients are at elevated risk of TB infection and disease. Tongue swabbing is an alternative diagnostic sample collection approach that was designed to mitigate this risk. This study assessed risk perceptions among healthcare workers (HCWs) using tongue swabs for TB diagnosis in South Africa during a respiratory virus pandemic.

Tongue swabs have shown promise as alternatives to sputum for detecting Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis (TB). Some of the most promising results have come from studies that used manual quantitative PCR (qPCR) to analyze swabs.

Antimicrobial resistant bacteria (ARB) can be shared between humans and animals through a common environment. The surveillance of ARB in the environment can inform us about contamination of shared ecosystems, like the Salish Sea, and how that contamination affects both the animals that rely on the ecosystem and humans who also live within it.

Environmental contamination of pathogenic viruses is a common occurrence and leading to a number of skin, enteric, and respiratory infections in occupational, nosocomial, and community settings. Viruses with environmental transmission routes have varied abilities to survive and persist in environmental mediums to aiding in their transmission to susceptible hosts.

Diarrheal disease remains a persistent global health threat and is ranked as the second leading cause of death for children under the age of five, with approximately 525,000 child deaths worldwide annually.