The strains found in the patients "are uncannily similar", he said.
Strains found in hospitals are more likely to be antibiotic-resistant, and patients are often immuno-compromised and can't fight back.
Curiously, the study didn't find much evidence that any given patient's bloodstream pathogen matched microbial strains found in other patients' blood or stool samples.
When the FBI was investigating the 2001 postal anthrax attacks, Salzberg used whole-genome analysis to compare the strains found in the letters with other variants.
Postings by epidemiologists since January on ProMED, a Web site of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, have stated that flu strains found in Taiwan and Japan were similar to those found in geese and ducks raised in China.
Scientists said knowing that the Florida strain resembled strains found in particular geographical or institutional locations would help focus the search for the source of the Florida germs, but would not necessarily prove their provenance.
He is collecting data on antibiotic use around the world to study patterns of resistance, including whether antibiotic-resistant strains found in farm animals in certain areas correlate with similar strains in people.
The mostly commonly supplemented bacterial strains found in the supermarket or health store are Lactobacillus (acidophilus) and Bifidobacterium, as well as some yeast strains including Saccharomyces cerevisiae, E. coli, and Bacillus species.
What's more, the scientists discovered that all the strains found in the Americas came from a single common ancestor - indicating that the virus could have been brought to the Americas by just one individual.
Beyond the detection of resistant HIV strains found in plasma samples, archival HIV-DNA in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) might represent a reservoir of additional resistance.
The bioreactor was inoculated with a co-culture of microorganisms including bacterial strains found in the cooper-ore mine and adopted to chosen pollutants.
