A mobile microbiology lab is enabling hospitals and the food industry to carry out testing for infectious diseases and superbugs - on a bus.
Innovation in Motion is a mobile facility featuring tools and equipment labs would need to identify and quarantine patients quickly and reduce the spread of in-house infections.
Food safety alerts have become of concern to many Canadians because of recent alerts about contaminated spinach and carrot juice.
Among the tools used on the bus is TEMPO, a new automated test instrument being used to assess food safety in the U.S. and Canada. As well as determining food quality control, TEMPO can be used to detect E. coli and salmonella.
When using TEMPO, a technologist dilutes a food sample, uses a vacuum and then places it within the tool.
"Within 24 hours, you have a result, which basically enumerates the number of bacteria that are found in the food sample," microbiologist Anne Beall of BioM�rieux, an in vitro infectious disease diagnostics company, told CTV's Canada AM.
The Innovation in Motion bus also has a tool that tests for infections people pick up in hospitals.
The BacT/Alert tests for blood, urine and body fluids and also for bacteria such as staph, an increasingly common infection of the skin that can thrive in hospital settings.
"We know that about 5 to 10 per cent of patients that go into hospitals come down with what we call a hospital-acquired infection," Beall said.
The bus also features tools such as Easy Mag, which extracts the DNA of the bug to determine its type and Vitek 2, a tool built for the space program that will be used to test bugs in space.
The Innovation in Motion bus was on display at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology earlier this week as part of a North American tour.
