Noam Hassenfeld

speaker

4,327 appearances 104 recordings 15 series first heard Feb 2025 last heard 5d ago

Noam Hassenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 103 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 43.

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The Documentary Podcast · The social lives of bacteria · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

Well, it's blood with nutrients.

And this is chocolate agar, which sounds really nice.

And it's got a deep chocolate color, but it's chocolate because it's got cooked blood in it.

So the blood plates, we could grow Staphylococcus aureus.

We could grow Group A Streptococcus aureus.

These are nasty skin infection bacteria.

These are nasty skin infection bites that can get into the bloodstream and really cause havoc.

So if I show you what we would do, for example, let's imagine... So you've received my swab from the post.

So we undo it, we take it out, and then it's pretty simple and straightforward.

I'll just use the chocolate as an example where we can just lift it up like that, and then we will do a big swab at the start so we get the bulk of the bacterial contamination there.

That's right, and then what we will do is we will streak it out

separately until in the end we're left with just a tiny squiggle of a line and what we hope is we've got the big bit of bacteria at the start and then as we drag it through the different pools along to this tiny line at the end we will get smaller and smaller amounts of bacteria so that we'll get one that we'll just be able to then take and do further testing on and it's that bacteria that we will then grow up in special different types of plates so we can see how they interact with the antibiotics.

Bacteria are very social in that they live all in various, what we call, dirty bits of the body together.

So, I mean, our gut is the typical example.

And through sharing bits of genetic information, I mean, essentially, you know, through the equivalent of a sexual reproduction, they can share genetic bits of code that tell the other bacteria...

high to be resistant also.

And that is the big, big worry.

So not just the staphylococci or the E. coli is affected, but the E. coli share with the pseudomonas, which share with the sericea, which share with the citrobacter, which share with the enterobacter.

And suddenly you get the whole gut flora becoming resistant.

Yeah, absolutely.

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