Need some Christmas gift ideas? These fuzzballs hail from Giant Microbes. Their motto? “We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes.” Hmmm. If that’s not a Long Tail business model, then I’m not sure what is. They also feature the ebola virus as well as one of my personal favs, streptococcus pyogenes (flesh-eating bacteria).

Seriously, though. Let’s talk about the spread of organisms. One thing I’ve noticed while wandering through the hospital giving out flu shots is the lack of standardization as far as sanitizing products are concerned. It’s true, I do happened to be just a little bit obsessed with purell dispensers after I spent hours and hours wandering through the outpatient center counting them and preparing excel reports. It really is important that there is one inside every patient room, and inside every exam room. You’d be surprised how much this varies from department to department. And you might be saying, “Really, Pixel, get a life. You really need to get back into the clinical arena.” But think about it. People are getting more and more worked up over MRSA and TB. Consistent hand sanitizing goes a very long way in stopping the spread of these organisms. Well maybe not TB, which is airborne. But still. I predict that you are going to start seeing a lot more purell dispensers in many places, and not just hospitals.

Now if I could just find a way to get back that extra layer of skin that disappears after extended hand sanitizing, I’d be a very wealthy woman.

I’ll leave you with one more pretty pathogen, UK artist, shardcore’s depiction of MRSA:

(found at shardcore.org.)