Resistance to antibiotics: New rapid diagnosis

A rapid diagnostic test for multi-resistance to broad-spectrum antibiotics has just been developed at the University of Fribourg. Prof Patrice Nordmann and Dr Laurent Poirel of the Medical and Molecular Microbiology Unit have been collaborating with Unit 914 of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Paris, of which Patrice Nordmann is also Director. This new test allows the identification, in less than two hours, of multidrug-resistant strains of Acinetobacter baumannii, an important hospital pathogen. The large-scale application of this test will mean better control of the spread of certain traits of antibiotic resistance.

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics has increased considerably over recent years. The situation is particularly dramatic in regard to gram-negative bacilli (Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii), in, for example, septicemic and abdominal infections and infections of the urinary tract and the lungs, considered to be the most frequent human infections in 2014. There are already signs of a real therapeutic impasse. Extremely broad-spectrum antibiotics, such as the broad-spectrum cephalosporins and the carbapenems, antibiotics of last resort, are already proving totally ineffective against certain strains of bacteria. It is estimated that in Europe the total number of deaths associated with multi-resistance to antibiotics is 25,000 annually. The rapid development of this resistance risks compromising whole areas of 21st century medicine which require effective preventative or curative antibiotics for transplants and major surgery as well as resuscitation.

Rapid diagnosis: a crucial factor

When a bacterium hydrolyses an antibiotic, it deactivates the way it works in some way. It is this phenomenon which had already been targeted by two rapid diagnosis tests developed by Patrice Nordmann and Laurent Poirel. These tests detected the presence of extended spectrum Beta lactamase enzymes and of carbapenemases (which hydrolyse wide-spectrum cephalosporins and carbapenems in Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, respectively). Now the two researchers have developed the CarbAcineto NP test which allows the detection of carbapenemase activity in A. baumannii; and it is this carbapenemase activity which is systematically associated with multi-resistance to antibiotics in this type of bacterium (fig. 1). The test is based on the acidification properties generated by the enzymatic hydrolysis of a carbapenem, Imipenem, when it is cleaved by a carbapenemase. The medium acidifies and the acidity (pH) indicator then turns from red to yellow. The detection of this carbapenemase activity can be realised by testing already isolated bacteria or any site infections. The result is obtained in less than 2 hours, while other techniques currently available require a minimum of 24 hours, most frequently 72 hours. The sensitivity and specificity of the CarbAcineto NP test is close to 100%, a value rarely achieved by a diagnostic test in medicine.

The development of the CarbAcineto test is an important contribution to the struggle against the emergence of antibiotic resistance. It is simple, cost-effective and, by detecting multidrug-resistant strains, it can prevent them spreading via outbreaks of hospital infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria, particularly among the most seriously ill patients -- those undergoing resuscitation. This new test also provides a guide in the choice between the very few remaining treatment options for infected patients.

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The above story is based on materials provided by Fribourg, Université de . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Salesforce and Philips Connect Doctors to Your Fitness Tracker

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Apple has its HealthKit, Google its Google Fit; and now Salesforce and Philips are getting into the game as well with a cloud-based platform could help doctors track data from a multitude of devices.

The two companies want to extend the Salesforce1 platform so that developers can write new apps that take data from different sources — MRI scanners or heart monitors, for example — and integrate it in a secure way while complying with privacy laws. Philips has already used the new platform to build its first two apps, Jeroen Tas, head of Philips Healthcare Informatic Solutions group, said today in a press conference.

Healthcare is one of the most promising fields for wearable computing and the Internet of Things. Today activity monitors like the Fitbit are mostly marketed to fitness nuts, but soon these types of devices could chronicling ill patients keep tabs on their health and gather vital data. And connecting these devices to the web could enable healthcare providers to respond to issues more quickly.

But making this work will require more than just a new breed of medical devices. Doctors and patients will also need ways to collect and analyze all of this new data.

The new apps are a data management hub for patients, called Philips eCareCoordinator, and eCareCompanion, a tool that lets healthcare providers view data from hundreds or even thousands of patients from a single dashboard.

Using eCareCoordinator, patients will collect data from connected devices, such as weight scale that sends information to the cloud, or pill sorters that track whether a patients has actually taken their pills. Patients can keep track of their own progress in the app, and even grant access to their family members. Doctors and nurses can check-up on their patients from eCareCompanion. If something goes wrong, for example a patient stops taking their pills, the provider will be alerted in the eCareCompanion dashboard.

The apps will be released later this summer, and will be piloted by Banner Health, a chain of hospitals and specialized healthcare facilities.

Although Philips is the first company to build software using the new platform, Tas says that it will be open to any company or developer. The business model for the apps, and the platform, is still unclear but Tas indicated that the apps would likely be paid for by patients, not insurance companies. But believes that the software will lower overall costs of healthcare, ultimately saving patients money.

Ultimately this is about building platforms for the world of the Internet of Things and wearables. It’s better business to build platforms than products, and we’re starting to major technology companies try to find ways to become the gatekeepers for the Internet of Things. Salesforce already rolled out a developer kit for building wearable applications that connect to the Salesforce cloud. And earlier this week Google announced an API for Nest, which will allow developers to connect their own devices and applications to the company’s line of home automation products.

40 Years On, the Barcode Has Turned Everything Into Information

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When Alan Haberman came to San Francisco to upend the global economy—which in the end he did—he wasn’t seeking venture capitalists or software engineers. This was the early 1970s, when a computer in every home was still just Steve Jobs’ teenage dream. Anyway, Haberman wasn’t a geek. He was a grocer.

According to his New York Times obituary, this mid-level supermarket executive needed to convince some fellow respectable businessmen to follow his lead. Haberman wanted grocery stores to embrace the 12-digit Universal Product Code—better known as the barcode—to create a standardized system for tracking inventory and speeding checkout. He took his fellow execs to a nice dinner. Then, as was the fashion at the time, they went to see Deep Throat. And they liked Haberman’s idea, these guys with wide lapels who changed the business of how Americans bought food—a change that over the past 40 years has come to mean so much more.

On June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m., Sharon Buchanan used a barcode to ring up a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. A tectonic shift in the underlying economics of trade in tangible, physical goods of all kinds soon followed. Today, we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of this decisive moment — a moment whose universal impact can be seen in just how banal scanning a barcode has become.

Alan Haberman. GS1 US

On June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m., Sharon Buchanan rang up a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio

Without the barcode, FedEx couldn’t guarantee overnight delivery. The just-in-time supply chain logistics that allow Walmart to keep prices low would not exist, and neither would big-box stores. Toyota’s revolutionary kanban manufacturing system depends on barcodes. From boarding passes to hospital patients, rental cars to nuclear waste, barcodes have reduced friction like few other technologies in the world’s slide toward globalization.

But putting barcodes on chocolate bars and instant oatmeal did more than revolutionize the economy, or the size of grocery stores. Thanks to bar codes, stuff was no longer just stuff. After a thing gets a barcode, that thing is no longer just itself. That thing now comes wrapped in a layer of information hovering just beyond sight in the digital ether. The thing becomes itself plus its data points, not just a physical object unto itself but tagged as a node in a global network of things. Barcodes serve up the augmented reality of the everyday, where everything can be cross-referenced with everything else, and everything has a number.

Haberman himself knew barcodes meant more than just a better way to manage supermarket inventory. He saw linguistics. He saw metaphysics. He also understood that those deeper abstract meanings held the key to barcodes’ radical practicality. “Go back to Genesis and read about the Creation,” Haberman once told The Boston Globe . “God says, ‘I will call the night “night”; I will call the heavens “heaven.”‘ Naming was important. Then the Tower of Babel came along and messed everything up. In effect, the U.P.C. has put everything back into one language, a kind of Esperanto, that works for everyone.”

In the mid-19th century, California’s railroad barons drove a golden spike through the preeminence of local trade. For most of the time humans have existed, what the average person could have depended almost entirely on where that person lived. The Transcontinental Railroad created the first physical network to break the consumer economy free from the constraints of location. Unglamorous folks like Haberman built an information network to overlay that physical network with an information network, midwifing the birth of a truly global economy in which technology gained final dominance over geography.

That loss of rootedness is what dystopianists see when they hold up the bar code as a talisman of cultural decay. When everything has a number, can our own commodification be far behind? What happens to individuality when we all become a function of our own data? A barcode tattoo has become a visual cliché, standard signifier of alienation. At the same time, nearly all babies born today in U.S. hospitals get barcode bracelets as soon as they’re swaddled.

When everything has a number, can our own commodification be far behind? What happens to individuality when we all become a function of our own data?

But for better or worse, the history of civilization is in many ways a history of taking inventory. Writing emerged out of the clay tablet ledgers of ancient Babylon. Phoenician sailors invented numbers as we know them to keep track of cargo.

Photo: Wrigley's

In 1949, grad school dropout Joe Woodland drew Morse code dots and dashes on a Florida beach, then drew vertical lines down from each character to tease out the first prototype of the modern barcode. Less than a century later, the physical world teems with metadata just waiting for a smartphone to reveal its “presence.” Even today’s barcodes themselves aren’t limited to information about an object’s price, owner or location, but can convey instructions to a 3-D printer to create the object itself. That pack of Juicy Fruit that Haberman helped send past the cash register is now in the Smithsonian. Perhaps the next pack of gum to enter the museum’s collection will be the one the food fabricator on your counter made for you when you pulled its barcode from an iPhone app and waved it past the scanner in your kitchen.

Barcodes did not merely speed up economic processes but opened up new spaces of economic possibilities, entirely new configurations that indeed changed the world of business but also the cultural and physical landscapes we all share. This simple technology accelerated the pace of globalization, not just by increasing the speed at which trade could take place but also by enabling entire industries to take on new shapes, to inhabit new forms. The evolution of the bar code has expanded the global economy’s capacity to evolve.

Metadata is becoming a ubiquitous feature of the physical world, a kind of second nature that will seem as natural to children born today as a video chat on a touchscreen tablet. Sheeted in this second skin of information, we ourselves are already in the process of inheriting and embodying the legacy of the barcode, sending the species spiraling into the new spaces of evolutionary possibility.

Snarky Lawmaker Reminds Former NSA Chief That Selling State Secrets Is Illegal

Keith Alexander, former director of the NSA, during his retirement ceremony March 28. Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Cybersecurity firms and snake-oil salesmen promising protection from online threats are ubiquitous these days, and it’s hard to stand out in such a crowded field—unless you’re the former leader of the world’s best hacking outfit. In that case, the promises you sell carry more weight—and a higher price tag.

Which may well explain why Gen. Keith Alexander, the former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, has launched the consulting firm IronNet Cybersecurity. It also may explain why a congressman has reminded the former spy that selling top secret info is a crime.

To capitalize on his recent departure from military intelligence—Alexander resigned in March following months of revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—the general is offering his security expertise to the banking industry for the fire sale price of $600,000 per month after first asking for $1 million. There are threats everywhere, Alexander warns, and “It would be devastating if one of our major banks was hit, because they’re so interconnected.”

That may be, but Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida) is suspicious that Alexander has anything useful to offer at that price—unless, that is, he’s peddling national security secrets.

In letters sent Wednesday (.pdf) to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the Consumer Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable and the Clearing House—all of which Alexander reportedly has approached about his services—Grayson made it clear to Alexander and those who might retain him that selling classified information is illegal.

“I am writing with concerns about the potential disclosure of classified information by former National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander,” Grayson wrote. “Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony.

“I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods,” Grayson continued. “Without the classified information he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you.”

Grayson’s staff says the congressman has not yet received a response from Alexander or any of the organizations that received the letter.

“The Congressman is very interested in what they have to say,” said Matt Stoller, Grayson’s senior policy advisor, in an email to WIRED.

Alexander could not be reached for comment.

These Automakers Picked Android Auto Instead of Apple CarPlay

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

At Wednesday’s I/O conference, Google unveiled Android Auto, its answer to Apple’s CarPlay system. In compatible vehicles—the first of which are due by the end of 2014—users will be able to use their Android phone’s interface through the car’s dashboard screen to navigate with Google Maps, play Spotify, send texts, and more.

There are sneaky elements to Google’s plan for Android Auto, but don’t worry about that just yet. For now, all you really need to know is which carmakers support which platform.

As it stands now, drivers who really want a Fiat 500 or Audi A3 should make sure they’ve got an Android. Ferrari, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz customers should go with Apple, though we assume they can afford a few smartphones.

These guys are Android Auto exclusive so far:

• Abarth


• Acura


• Alfa Romeo


• Audi


• Bentley


• Chrysler


• Dodge


• Fiat


• Infiniti


• Jeep


• Maserati


• Mazda


• RAM


• Renault


• Seat


• Skoda


• Volkswagen

And these brands are currently working with only Apple’s CarPlay:

• BMW


• Citroen


• Ferrari


• Jaguar-Land Rover


• Mercedes-Benz


• Peugeot


• Toyota

A few brands have already signed up with both tech giants:

• Chevrolet


• Ford


• Honda


• Hyundai


• Kia


• Mitsubishi


• Nissan


• Opel


• Subaru


• Suzuki


• Volvo

Since most car companies won’t want a potential customer’s smartphone preference to decide their choice of car, we expect this list to grow.

Why GoPro’s Success Isn’t Really About The Cameras

GoPro’s Hero 3 camera Jae C. Hong/AP

Millions of people have used GoPro’s wearable cameras to record their every sky-diving, drone-flying, shark-riding adventure. But the San Mateo, California-based company might have just pulled off the greatest stunt of all with the biggest initial public offering of a consumer electronics company in more than 20 years.

There’s a good reason we haven’t seen any consumer electronics companies go public recently (Skullcandy’s $189 million IPO in 2011 is the most recent), and that’s because smartphones—and the gargantuan companies that make them—can do and build almost everything and anything. On any given day, our phones can act as a GPS system, a video game console, a fitness tracker, a stereo, a camera, and oh yeah, a telephone, all in one. To launch a standalone consumer electronics company that does just one thing, even if it can do that one thing really, really well, is a risky endeavor in the age of the smartphone.

All of that makes GoPro, which raised $427 million at a valuation of $2.96 billion in its IPO, something of an anomaly. After all, it was just a few years ago that the Flip Video camera, another gadget that dominated the camcorder market for a time, foundered, rendered obsolete by the proliferation of smartphones with ever-improving cameras. Even as the Flip floundered, however, GoPro, which sold its first camera in 2004, flourished. What separates GoPro from Flip is that all along, GoPro has sold consumers not on the camera, itself, but on something the smartphone can’t easily replace: the experience of using the camera.

“They don’t just sell a video camera, they sell the memory of the wave or the ski trip down the slope,” says Ben Arnold, a consumer technology industry analyst at The NPD Group. “I think we are entering an age where lifestyle in technology is becoming very important.”

That’s the reason, Arnold says, that brands like Beats and FitBit have done so well. They say something about the people who wear them. The iPhone might have been a status symbol when it was first introduced. Now, it’s a utility that says as much about its owner as the fact that she is wearing shoes. But when you see someone with one of those GoPro Hero 3 cameras strapped to her chest, it’s a signal to the world that she is about to do something awesome.

The company has its customers to thank for helping it build that reputation. Following the lead of GoPro’s thrill-seeking CEO and founder Nick Woodman, GoPro users have flooded the Internet with videos of their own adventures. In 2013 alone, GoPro customers uploaded 2.8-years worth of video featuring GoPro in the title, according to the company’s S-1 filing. In the first quarter of 2014, people watched over 50 million hours of videos with GoPro somewhere in the title, filename, tag, or description. Each video not only serves as a customer testimonial, but as guerrilla advertising, giving potential customers millions of reasons why they should buy one of GoPro’s clunky little cameras. And so, despite the fact that GoPro only sells cameras (and accessories and mounts for cameras), it became better known as an adventure sports brand than as a camera manufacturer.

GoPro has sold consumers not on the camera, itself, but on something the smartphone can’t easily replace: the experience of using the camera.

Now, the challenge ahead for GoPro is to start making money not just on cameras, but on the brand, too. In its S-1, the company admitted that it depends on camera sales “for substantially all of our revenue, and any decrease in the sales of these products would harm our business.” At the same time, the company wrote, “We do not expect to continue to grow in the future at the same rate as we have in the past.” That prediction is already coming true. Last year, GoPro’s year-over-year revenue growth fell to 87 percent from 125 percent the year before.

To avoid saturating the market, GoPro is now looking to turn itself into a media company. Already, it’s planning to launch a GoPro Channel on Xbox Live, and recently it made a deal with Virgin America to license videos for in-air entertainment. While GoPro hasn’t taken in any revenue from these deals yet, the company’s S-1 says that this year it will begin earning revenue from advertising on its Xbox, Virgin America, and YouTube channels.

If GoPro can make this transition successfully (and that’s a big if), it could serve as an exemplary model of what it takes to build a successful consumer electronics company in a smartphone-dominated world. As Adam Dornbusch, GoPro’s head of content distribution, recently summed it up for Variety , “The camera is just the tool to get to content.”

Why the Supreme Court May Finally Protect Your Privacy in the Cloud

Flickr/Tim Sackton

When the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in the case of Riley v. California, it definitively told the government to keep its warrantless fingers off your cell phone. But as the full impact of that opinion has rippled through the privacy community, some SCOTUS-watchers say it could also signal a shift in how the Court sees the privacy of data in general—not just when it’s stored on your physical handset, but also when it’s kept somewhere far more vulnerable: in the servers of faraway Internet and phone companies.

In the Riley decision, which dealt with the post-arrest searches of an accused drug dealer in Boston and an alleged gang member in California, the court unanimously ruled that police need a warrant to search a suspect’s phone. The 28-page opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts explicitly avoids addressing a larger question about what’s known as the “third-party doctrine,” the notion that any data kept by a third party such as Verizon, AT&T, Google or Microsoft is fair game for a warrantless search. But even so, legal analysts reading between the opinion’s lines say they see evidence that the court is shifting its view on that long-stewing issue for online privacy. The results, if they’re right, could be future rulings from America’s highest court that seriously restrict both law enforcement’s and even the NSA’s abilities to siphons Americans’ data from the cloud.

Digital Is Different

The key realization in Roberts’ ruling, according to Center For Democracy and Technology attorney Kevin Bankston, can be summarized as “digital is different.” Modern phones generate a volume of private data that means they require greater protection than other non-digital sources of personal information. “Easy analogies of digital to traditional analog surveillance won’t cut it.”

Daniel Solove, a law professor at George Washington Law School, echoes that sentiment in a blog post and points to this passage in the opinion:

First, a cell phone collects in one place many distinct types of information—an address, a note, a prescription, a bank statement, a video—that reveal much more in combination than any isolated record. Second, a cell phone’s capacity allows even just one type of information to convey far more than previously possible. The sum of an individual’s private life can be reconstructed through a thousand photographs labeled with dates, locations, and descriptions.

That argument about the nature of digital collections of personal data seems to apply just as much to information held by a third party company as it does to information held in the palm of an arrested person’s hand. And Solove argues that could spell trouble for the third-party doctrine when it next comes before the Court. “The Court’s reasoning in Riley suggests that perhaps the Court is finally recognizing that old physical considerations—location, size, etc.—are no longer as relevant in light of modern technology. What matters is the data involved and how much it reveals about a person’s private life,” he writes. “If this is the larger principle the Court is recognizing today, then it strongly undermines some of the reasoning behind the third party doctrine.

The Court’s opinion was careful not to make any overt reference to the third-party doctrine. In fact, it includes a tersely-worded footnote cautioning that the ruling’s arguments about physical search of phones “do not implicate the question whether the collection or inspection of aggregated digital information amounts to a search under other circumstances.”

But despite the Court’s caveat, its central argument in the opinion—that the notions of privacy applied to analog data are no longer sufficient to protect digital data from warrantless searches—doesn’t limit itself to physical access to devices. And the opinion seems to hint at the Court’s thoughts on protecting one sort of remotely-stored phone data in particular: location data.

The Logic of Location Data

The Riley ruling cites an opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in the case of US vs. Jones, another landmark Supreme Court decision in 2012 that ended warrantless use of GPS devices to track criminal suspects’ cars. GPS devices, Sotomayor wrote at the time, create “a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” Roberts’ reference to that opinion in Tuesday’s ruling seems to acknowledge that the sensitivity of GPS device data extends to phone location data too. And there’s little logical reason to believe that phone data becomes less sensitive when it’s stored by AT&T instead of in an iPhone’s flash memory.

With Riley and Jones, “we’ve now seen two indications that the Supreme Court is rethinking privacy for stored data,” says Alex Abdo, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Neither raises the question directly, but they both contain clues into the mindset of the court, and they both suggest that there’s another victory for privacy in the waiting.”

“If I were to guess,” Abdo adds, “I would predict that the Supreme Court will make good on its suggestion that the third-party doctrine doesn’t make sense in the context of cloud storage.”

The ripples from Riley may extend to the NSA’s surveillance practices, too.

The ripples from Riley may extend to the NSA’s surveillance practices, too, says Jennifer Granick, director of Civil Liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. She points out that the NSA has used the same third-party doctrine arguments to justify its collection of Americans’ phone data under section 215 of the Patriot Act. “What will this mean for the NSA’s bulk collection of call detail records and other so-called ‘metadata’?” she asks in a blog post. “The opinion suggests that when the Court has that question before it, the government’s approach may not win the day.”

Thanks to the caveat footnote limiting its significance to physical searches of phones, the Riley ruling likely won’t set any precedent useful for privacy activists just yet. But the CDT’s Kevin Bankston says it hints that the Supreme Court has acknowledged the need for new privacy protections in the age of mobile computing. “The Court is clearly concerned with allowing access to data in the cloud or on cell phones without a warrant. And that’s likely indicative about how they’ll approach things like cell phone location tracking and NSA surveillance in the future,” Bankston says. “The fourth amendment for the 21st century will be quite different from the fourth amendment in the 20th century.”