Transfer of bacteria from fabrics to hands and other fabrics: development and application of a quantitative method using<i>Staphylococcus aureus</i>as a model
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: To develop and apply a quantitative protocol for assessing the transfer of bacteria from bleached and undyed fabrics of 100% cotton and 50% cotton + 50% polyester (poly cotton) to fingerpads or other pieces of fabric. METHODS AND RESULTS: Test pieces of the fabrics were mounted on custom-made stainless steel carriers to give a surface area of 1 cm in diameter, and each piece seeded with about 10(5) cfu of Staphylococcus aureus from an overnight broth culture; the inoculum contained 5% fetal bovine serum as the soil load. Transfer from fabric to fabric was performed by direct contact using moist and dry fabrics. Transfers from fabrics to fingerpads of adult volunteers were tested using moist, dry and re-moistened pieces of the fabrics, with or without friction during the contact. Bacterial transfer from fabrics to moistened fingerpads was also studied. All the transfers were conducted under ambient conditions at an applied pressure of 0.2 kg cm(-2). After the transfer, the recipient fingerpads or fabric pieces were eluted, the eluates spread-plated, along with appropriate controls, on tryptic soy agar and the percentage transfer calculated after the incubation of the plates for 24 h at 37 degrees C. CONCLUSION: Bacterial transfer from moist donor fabrics using recipients with moisture was always higher than that to and from dry ones. Friction increased the level of transfer from fabrics to fingerpads by as much as fivefold. Bacterial transfer from poly cotton was consistently higher when compared with that from all-cotton material. SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPACT OF THE STUDY: The data generated should help in the development of better models to assess the role fabrics may play as vehicles for infectious agents. Also, the basic design of the reported methodology lends itself to work with other types of human pathogens.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it