Global mortality associated with 33 bacterial pathogens in 2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

First Screening of Beta-Lactam Antibiotic Resistance Genes and Bacterial Diversity in the Public Transport System of Quito, Ecuador

“…The bacterial diversity in QPT shows the typical classes found in environmental and anthropogenic surfaces, where Alphaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria, Bacilli, and Actinobacteria are the most abundant [48]. Four species found in QPT (Staphylococcus aureus, E. coli, S. pneumoniae, and K. pneumoniae) along with P. aeruginosa were the etiological agent for 54.9% of deaths among 33 investigated bacteria in a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 [49]. The 16S rDNA barcoding does not allow one to differentiate between E. coli strains.…”

Genomic epidemiology ofS. aureusisolated from bloodstream infections in South America during 2019 supports regional surveillance

“…We made available the assemblies from this first survey via the PathogenWatch platform to facilitate the exploration of these data and the comparison with datasets from other countries/regions. Structured surveys were conducted in Europe in the past [16,17] and, were they to be adopted in other regions in a standardised and concerted manner, they could amount to a global picture of this pathogen that was responsible for the largest number of deaths worldwide in 2019 [109].…”

Northern Normal – Laboratory Networks, Microbial Culture Collections, and Taxonomies of Power (1939-2000)

“…However, disease burden studies for sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania continue to rely on extrapolating data from limited numbers of mostly urban sentinel sites or from proxy sources like polio monitoring and traveller surveillance and extrapolating from passive surveillance data to calculate disease incidence and type prevalence (Ingle et al 2019;Phillips et al 2021). Similar to the phage-based tabular surveys of the Cold War era, this ongoing patchiness of microbiological coverage is, however, rendered invisible in maps published by ICEPT successors like the Lancet Global Burden of Disease reports (Stanaway et al 2019;Ikuta et al 2022). Meanwhile, lack of Southern control over Southern data remains a significant impediment to developing local solutions for varying local problems.…”

“…Northern Normal lifts the lid on the "hidden infrastructures" (Bowker and Starr 2000) underpinning global disease surveillance and typing efforts. Focusing on typhoid, which continues to sicken millions and annually kill between 118,000-271,000 people -with the highest mortality occurring in children in low-income settings - (Ikuta et al, 2022), the article reconstructs the global spread of a revolutionary new surveillance technology called bacteriophage-typing between 1938 and 1980. Originating in Weimar Germany (Kirchhelle 2019), phage-typing uses standardised sets of bacteria-infecting viruses (bacteriophages) to differentiate between bacterial strains.…”