MICROBE 2018 recap - Evolution of Tuberculosis

https://me.me

So it's Sunday...the meeting started Thursday night. Usually about this time, depending on how ambitious your schedule for the meeting, you are starting to get a little peek'ed and the sessions are starting to run together. For me - a good deal of money is spent coming to these conferences so I have a tendency to pack my schedule. This often times ends in overlapping sessions necessitating a cost/benefit analysis of whether I should risk missing the beginning of the next talk by running to the session after this one or stay in this session and listen to a talk that is perhaps less "soul-on-fire" interesting for me. In either case, you start tapping your coffee IV to make sure it's running only to realize that by this point you've probability built up a super human caffeine tolerance. Yet you still grab that cup and hold it at the morning sessions with such care and possessiveness you would think it a pot of gold.

So major kudos to Caitlin Pepperell and her ability to recapture my attention as my first coffee wore off and I started in on coffee #2. It helps that my next favorite bug - after Vibrio, is Mycobacteria

Evidence I stayed awake...the whole time:

You can decipher my notes above or just read the recap below.

MICROBE 2018 recap - Ancient Infectious Disease - Paleomicrobiology

So for this session and the rest of the meeting my laptop decided it no longer wanted to hold a charge so I was relegated to using old school methods of taking notes...my notebook and a pen! Gasp.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/pens

Didier Raoult, Faculte de Medecine; IHU Mediterranee Infection
Paleomicrobiology: Human Infections and Antiquity

"Everything was called plague back then..."

There was the Thucidides plague in Athens, the Antonine plague, Justinian plague, Black Death,then the post Columbian era syphilis and 'eruptive fever' (measles and smallpox) followed by the great wars and lice; Douai (18th century), Napoleon (19th century), WWI in the 20th century and the Bolshevic revolution.

Needless to say there's a lot of disease in our human history leaving an indelible mark...that we can find in frozen tissues, fixed tissues, mummies, bone and teeth. The most popular technique or perhaps the most used methodology you would start with in detection of pathogens is PCR.