The patient staggered into the treatment room of A&E, moving slowly and erratically. His eyes were unfocused and he only stopped moving when he reached the wall opposite the door. His anxious wife walked in behind him and took a seat opposite the examination couch.

The Doctor took one look at the patient…

It’s that time of year again, in UK hospitals healthcare staff are walking the wards with a slightly sore left arm sucking on a boiled sweet lollipop… yep, it’s flu vaccine season!
 
Every year the NHS tries to vaccinate as many of the frontline healthcare staff as possible in order to prevent outbreaks of influenza in our hospitals. In addition GPs are busy coaxing as many of the over 65 year olds as possible to get vaccinated before “flu season” starts. This is in addition to the routine flu vaccination of 2-3 year old children in reception classes and Years 1-4 at school (age 4-8 years).

Gosh nearly 2,000 of you read last weeks’ blog on cholera (that’s a record) and it sparked a couple of really good questions to Nuts & Bolts.
 
One from Virginia related to the use of TCBS agar to grow Vibrio cholerae, so I thought that this week I would cover some “old fashioned” microbiology and talk about agar. Really! I hear you cry “that’s not very interesting”! Well, as “interesting” is banned when discussing microbiology, I’ll use “actually very clever” to describe the reasons why we use different types of agar in the laboratory… here goes…

The A&E doctor rang the Microbiologist to discuss their patient. The patient had recently returned from volunteering at a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh and now presented to A&E with watery diarrhoea which had been going on for a few days.

​The patient had not been able to get an immediate appointment with their GP and so had come to A&E a couple of days ago, despite their problem not really being an Accident or an Emergency. Stool samples had been sent to the lab on the first visit and the A&E doctor was following up the results as the patient had returned to the department with ongoing symptoms. The A&E doctor was calling the Microbiologist because no cause of the diarrhoea had been identified on the lab report.

Having recently just returned from a holiday where the main focus was relaxation and yoga I then saw this story about how filthy is your yoga mat on the Internet… crikey!

So the BBC news story is about what you can potentially catch from dirty gym equipment and gym mats due to the unhygienic practices of some gym members. And I have to agree, some people are particularly revolting in that they sweat and drip all over equipment then just wander off leaving someone else to either clean up after them or lie in the wet patches!
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This got me thinking, what can you catch from a yoga mat? What it comes down to is almost any bacteria, virus, fungi or parasite which can be part of the human microbial flora is potentially transferable between people, if the microorganism can survive on the surface acting as the vector e.g. the mat or equipment. These transferred microorganisms colonise the equipment and then “hop onto” and colonise the next person to use that equipment. Actually…do I really want to know all of this as I’m about to go to the gym?!