Tim Ford publishes two new articles
Tim Ford, Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Students, recently published two articles, "Temporal Bacterial Diversity Associated with Metal-contaminated River Sediments," and "Control of Waterborne Disease in Developing Countries."
The first article, "Temporal Bacterial Diversity Associated with Metal-contaminated River Sediments," Ecotoxicology 2009 [Epub ahead of print], Bouskill NJ, Barker-Finkel J, Galloway TS, Handy RD, Ford TE, is a paper that describes the activity, abundance and diversity naturally occurring bacterial communities exposed to high levels of contaminant metals in the Clark Fork River Superfund site in Eastern Montana. This is a site that has been dramatically affected by proximity to the "Anaconda Smelter where, for over a century, waste from copper smelting activity has been deposited either directly into the river or washed in as part of tailings run off following heavy rainfall.operations." Ford's doctoral student, Nick Bouskill used measurements of enzyme activity, molecular fingerprinting and quantitative PCR to describe the diversity of bacterial communities in sediments within these contaminated sites.
The second article, Ford TE, Hamner S. "Control of Waterborne Disease in Developing Countries," in Mitchell R, Gu JD. (eds), Environmental Microbiology, Wiley 2009, pp33-56, is a book chapter in the second edition of a well know microbiology text book edited by Professor Ralph Mitchell from Harvard University and Professor Ji-Dong Gu from the University of Hong Kong. The chapter describes waterborne disease in developing countries, the important pathogens and some of the emerging risks, the many approaches to control, and the key role that surveillance, prediction and modeling will play in reducing future waterborne disease epidemics and pandemics.