Feb 13, 2012 | Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory News, Laboratory Operations, Laboratory Pathology, Management & Operations
Vapor-based fumigant system could prove useful in disinfecting microbiology labs, clinical labs, and histology labs
There’s a new technology that bears great promise for improving existing methods of disinfecting hospital rooms and health facilities, including clinical laboratories. This pioneering work was developed as part of a collaboration involving infection control expert Dick Zoutman, M.D., FRCPC, who is affiliated with Queen’s University of Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
This technology is a vapor-based fumigant system and is coming to market with the name AsepticSure. It will be sold by Medizone International, Inc.. The invention makes a strong argument for changing the way hospital rooms and other healthcare facilities are disinfected. (more…)
Jan 30, 2012 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Cheaper, faster, and more accurate rapid gene sequencing technologies show great promise in identifying infectious disease agents
In clinical laboratories across the nation, microbiology has greatly benefited from the introduction of molecular diagnostics in clinical practice. Now the field of microbiology is poised to undergo a more profound transformation of clinical practice, due to advances in whole genome sequencing.
Leaders in this field are calling these developments “transformative” and say they have the potential to change “all aspects of microbiology.” The driver to this emerging trend is advanced technology that makes it possible to sequence the whole gene sequence of an organism in a day or less, for a cost that is $1,000 and falling rapidly.
In the past six months, microbiologists and pathologists at such hospitals as Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, have begun to do whole genome sequencing of microbes found in specimens collected from patients arriving in the emergency room. The New York Times wrote about these developments in a story titled “The New Generation of Microbe Hunters,” that it published on August 29, 2011.
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