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Asked by Luca ? to Daniela ?, ☣ Danna, Jonny, Juan, Lindsay on 13 Jun 2016.
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Danna Gifford answered on 13 Jun 2016:
Hi Luca,
For a few months in my last job, I was working with a bacterium called Staphylococcus aureus that had been found in peoples’ noses. I’d say that was probably the most dangerous bunch of bacteria I’d worked with, mostly because I didn’t know exactly what they were.I’ve also worked with another species of bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. P. aeruginosa (for short) is the #4 most common infection of people in hospitals, and causes serious illness in people who have the disease Cystic Fibrosis, which causes a build up of sticky phlegm and mucus in the lungs that the bacteria grow on. The strain of P. aeruginosa that I worked was made less dangerous by growing it in the lab for a long time—more than 50 years.
I never got infected by any of my bacteria, but one of my fellow PhD students did get a P. aeruginosa infection in his ear! We were all worried for a short time that maybe our strain might be more dangerous than we thought. But thankfully we studied the strain from his ear and found that it could not have been one of our lab strains. We think he really picked it up when he had gone swimming in a non-chlorinated pool while on holiday…
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Lindsay Robinson answered on 13 Jun 2016:
Hi Luca. As a chemist I don’t actually work with bacteria or viruses I spend all my time using chemicals. Some of them are very dangerous! I’ve used sodium cyanide which is a killer in even small amounts. I make different drugs from these chemicals which are then tested by the biologists in my team to see if they can treat diseases like diabetes or cancer.
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Juan Ortiz answered on 13 Jun 2016:
To be honest all the bacteria I have been working with are harmless to humans. I used to work with a bacteria that eats other bacteria so it was only dangerous for them 🙂
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Jonathan Hunter answered on 13 Jun 2016:
I’m a chemist but I’ve worked in a more biological setting as well. I currently work with Ultraviolet light which can cause cancer.
In an old job I worked with blood samples. Although it was screened, it could have contained HIV, hepatitis, or Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease).
HIV is a deadly virus and so is hepatitis. BSE is a deadly prion, like a virus but without a shell.
So pretty nasty stuff! -
Daniela Lobo answered on 15 Jun 2016:
Hi Luca,
Because we are developing a way of detecting dangerous bacteria (for example, for bioterrorism) we have to work with these bugs directly.
I mainly work with Salmonella Typhimurium and E. coli (a dangerous strain called O157), but they are heat-killed before I touch them!
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