Scientific Citizenship

6 downloads 0 Views 348KB Size Report
... https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode), which grants the public the nonexclusive ...... Widerström, M., J. Wiström, E. Ek, H. Edebro, and.
JOURNAL OF MICROBIOLOGY & BIOLOGY EDUCATION, March 2016, p. 172-182 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v17i1.1008

Scientific Citizenship

Crowdsourced Data Indicate Widespread Multidrug Resistance in Skin Flora of Healthy Young Adults † Scott Freeman1*, Nnadozie O. Okoroafor1, Christopher M. Gast2 , Mikhail Koval1, David Nowowiejski3, Eileen O’Connor1, Robert D. Harrington4, John W. Parks1, and Ferric C. Fang3 1Department of Biology University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, 2Interdisciplinary Program in Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management; currently Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, 3Department of Laboratory Medicine and Harborview Medical Center, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, 4Department of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195

In a laboratory exercise for undergraduate biology majors, students plated bacteria from swabs of their facial skin under conditions that selected for coagulase-negative Staphylococcus; added disks containing the antibiotics penicillin, oxacillin, tetracycline, and erythromycin; and measured zones of inhibition. Students also recorded demographic and lifestyle variables and merged this information with similar data collected from 9,000 other students who had contributed to the database from 2003 to 2011. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) testing performed at the Harborview Medical Center Microbiology Laboratory (Seattle, WA) indicated a high degree of accuracy for student-generated data; species identification with a matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) Biotyper revealed that over 88% of the cells analyzed by students were S. epidermidis or S. capitus. The overall frequency of resistant cells was high, ranging from 13.2% of sampled bacteria resistant to oxacillin to 61.7% resistant to penicillin. Stepwise logistic regressions suggested that recent antibiotic use was strongly associated with resistance to three of the four antibiotics tested (p = 0.0003 for penicillin, p