Comes news that could lead someone to adapt Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film “The Birds” and take it in a different direction-a direction that’s both scary and scatalogical. Maryn McKenna, the science journalist widely known as Scary Disease Girl, tweeted this alert:
Seagulls: threat or menace? They’re pooping resistant bacteria on your favorite beach.
She gives details in her blog: “At the annual ICAAC meeting in Chicago, the largest infectious-disease conference in the United States, Dr. Patrice Nordmann of the Hopital de Bicetre near Paris disclosed results of a small study that looked for resistant bacteria in the feces of seagulls landing on Miami Beach in Florida.”
Here are videos of (1) Dr. Nordmann, urged on by a Dr. Fox, describing the discovery; (2) a video of Mr. Hitchock lecturing about his own, earlier discovery; (3) an abstract of Mr. Hitchcock’s old thesis; and (4) a short portion of Mr. Hitchock’s seminal work, showing the effect of certain birds upon certain students.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ8zb2Daxw
This post originally appeared on Improbable Research.
