Select your language
Select your language
Since May, 31 we can be pleased about a new associated project in our alliance:
Vitality
More than 2 million children globally live with HIV, 90% of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Vitality is an EDCTP (European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership) funded clinical study in Zambia and Zimbabwe analysing the effect of vitamin D supplementation on health improvement of HIV-positive children.
Press Release of the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fishery (IGB) , 25.07.2022
Bacterial communities are often well adapted and stable in a particular environment whether it be a human mouth or a lake. Humans are altering environments at an increasing rate, none more so than in cities and their surroundings in the process of urbanization. In a study published today in the journal “Science of the Total Environment“, led by scientists from IGB and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) as part of the Leibniz Research Alliance “Infections”, bacterial communities were examined in urban water bodies and wastewater in Berlin and compared to less anthropogenically influenced lakes from surrounding rural regions. The results reveal that urbanization introduces large amounts of nutrients, chemical pollutants and antimicrobial products, and thereby changes the makeup of the microbiome by favouring groups of bacteria that contain human pathogenic bacteria, with yet unknown consequences for ecosystem functioning and human and animal health.
Press Release of the Leibniz-Institut für Zoo- und Wildtierforschung (IZW) im Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V., 31.03.2022 13:40
In North America, SARS-CoV-2 has spread from humans to white-tailed deer. The deer are now considered SARS-CoV-2 reservoirs and may even spill virus back to humans. A science team headed by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and the Charité have now shown that in Germany and Austria this has not happened as all deer tested were negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The research is reported in the journal “Microorganisms” in a special issue on Viruses of Wild Mammals.
PhD introduction of the week: Pau De Yebra Rodó, Microbiologist and Bioinformatician in IPT6.
As water plays a key role as a vector and reservoir for AMR transmission in urban and rural areas, the primary objective of IPT5 "Water as habitat and vector for AMR microbes" is to determine the abundance and diversity of AMR and the bacteria carrying them in bodies of water and their sediments along an urban-rural gradient by means of metagenome analyses. In cooperation with the other IPTs, a broad overview of AMR profiles in different waters and potential disease vectors in the Berlin-Brandenburg region will be elaborated.
This week we introduce the PhD student of IPT5: Megarsa Bedasa Jaleta, Veterinarian and Veterinary Epidemiologist .
Within the framework of his project "AMR spread in animal husbandry- mechanisms and possible interventions", Megarsa is comparing the occurrence of AMR in pigs under different hygienic conditions and when different feed additives are administered. Based on these results, potential strategies to control the spread of AMR in livestock breeding will be defined in close collaboration with the other IPTs, thus reducing the potential contamination of the environment.