Comments on: Mutants: A Story About Tracking A Hospital Killer http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/17/mutants-a-story-about-tracking-a-hospital-killer/ A science salon hosted by National Geographic Magazine Fri, 24 May 2013 15:24:21 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2-alpha By: Tan http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/17/mutants-a-story-about-tracking-a-hospital-killer/#comment-38830 Tan Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:40:42 +0000 http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/?p=150635#comment-38830 Is this bacteria infects a specific target only and it does not differentiate between patients?
What kind of patients will have a higher risks of getting this?
How it caused the death of patients?

[CZ: KPC is a major risk for people with weak or suppressed immune systems. Healthy people may not know they have it--making them carriers.]

]]> By: Konrad Scheffler http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/17/mutants-a-story-about-tracking-a-hospital-killer/#comment-38794 Konrad Scheffler Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:38:27 +0000 http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/?p=150635#comment-38794 I’m happy to see you writing this, but puzzled why you’re implying that tree-building software packages do not already exist – they’ve been around for decades, and these days pipelines for analysing next-generation sequence data are also a dime a dozen. Exactly what new code did Snitkin need to write?

[CZ: The existing software was not sufficient for all the things Snitkin needed to do, such as take epidemiology into account. All the details are in the paper they published on the outbreak.]

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