Hello dear community,
currently I am facing some issues with a bacterial murine model of pneumonia with Klebsiella. To access the signs of lung injury is straightforward with counts of lung lavage CFUs. However, further evaluation of BAL by flow cytometry (i.e. phagocytosis, transmigration, adhesion), ELISA and other techniques exposes the lab. staff and equipment to persistent contamination with a high risk of development of human pneumonia.
Murine models are very well described in the literature but human health low-risk alternatives are not. For our future work, we are considering between the most common sources of murine pneumonia, bacterial or viral, and trying to understand which one has less human health impact in the lab. For the bacterial alternative I have considered Bartonell henselae, Klebsiella pneumonia, Pasteurella pneumotropica, with the first being the safest. Conserning the Pneumonia virus in mice, the family Paramyxoviridae, subfamily Pneumovirinae seems to be the standard but the literature is limitless.
Your advice will be extremely valuable for our future experiments and safety of our lab. members.
Thank you so much for your answer.
The effort I am trying to make is to avoit complete exposure of lab. staff to contaminants. A S2 lab. would be enough to contain any bacterial or viral infection. But since we are integrated into a medical school, attendees are not aware of the risk of working with pneumonia and spread easily contaminants.
To work with a virus that would infect only rodents would be ideal. Working with a bacterial species that would only infect immuno-compromised can be handled.
All the best.
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