Publications by authors named "B Verhaegen"
According to World Health Organization (WHO), antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is currently one of the world's top 10 health threats, causing infections to become difficult or impossible to treat, increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, disability, and death. Accurate surveillance is a key component in the fight against AMR. Wastewater is progressively becoming a new player in AMR surveillance, with the promise of a cost-effective real-time tracking of global AMR profiles in specific regions.
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- Shotgun metagenomics helps find germs in food quickly, but usually needs extra steps to grow the germs first, which can mess up the results.
- Researchers tried a new method called adaptive sampling to avoid growing the germs and just focus on what they want to find in food samples.
- The new method worked better than the old way and helped scientists identify dangerous germs more accurately, making it faster to solve food safety problems.
Article Synopsis
- Consumption of raw or undercooked meat can lead to infections from Toxoplasma gondii, but salt and additives in meat may impact the parasite's survival.
- A new in vitro method was developed to replace the mouse bioassay for testing how salting affects T. gondii viability, using meat samples from infected sheep to evaluate parasite growth in cultured cells.
- The study found that untreated meat samples had viable T. gondii, while higher salt concentrations (2.7% NaCl) significantly reduced parasite growth, demonstrating the effectiveness of the new in vitro method for assessing T. gondii viability.
Whole-genome sequencing has become the method of choice for bacterial outbreak investigation, with most clinical and public health laboratories currently routinely using short-read Illumina sequencing. Recently, long-read Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencing has gained prominence and may offer advantages over short-read sequencing, particularly with the recent introduction of the R10 chemistry, which promises much lower error rates than the R9 chemistry. However, limited information is available on its performance for bacterial single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based outbreak investigation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn urgent need for effective surveillance strategies arose due to the global emergence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Although vaccines and antivirals are available, concerns persist about the evolution of new variants with potentially increased infectivity, transmissibility, and immune evasion. Therefore, variant monitoring is crucial for public health decision-making.
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