Housed near Bristol, UKHSA’s National Collection of Pathogenic Fungi (NCPF) is home to more than 4,500 isolates of potentially deadly fungi isolates, gathered over the last century.
In this blog post, we’ll cover the history of the NCPF: why it was set up, what it houses and how it continues to play an important role in protecting our health.
Anyone who has read some of the earlier entries in this blog cannot fail to be impressed by the speed at which our public health science is evolving and the rate at which our medical microbiology is modernising. Of course, …
Tuberculosis (TB) is a vital public health problem facing England. Rates have stabilised over the past seven years, but the incidence of TB in England remains high compared to most other Western European countries. TB is transmitted from person to …
Over the past 70 years antibiotics have been hugely important in our defence against infectious diseases caused by bacteria. However, bacterial resistance to antibiotics is becoming a global public health problem and if we are to develop new treatments for …
Microbiology is the study of microscopic organisms such as viruses and bacteria. In the past as microbiologists we would have relied on growing, staining and peering down microscopes as a way of identifying and characterising clinically important organisms, such as …
In December 2012, Prime Minister David Cameron announced the “100,000 Genome Project” where the personal DNA code (known as a genome) of up to 100,000 patients, or infections in patients, will be decoded over the next 5 years. This will …
