FLICKR, DUSTIN REEVES
Children often share oral microbes with their mothers. But in a new study, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have found that 72 percent of children harbored at least one strain of the cavity-causing Streptococcus mutans not found in cohabiting family members. The findings, presented last week (June 17) at the American Society for Microbiology’s annual meeting in Boston, suggest these microbes may have come from other, non-relative children.
“What we wanted to look at with this study is, could we track the transmission of this bacterium in a large-scale epidemiological study conducted in a small town in rural Alabama,” study coauthor Stephanie Momeni, a doctoral student in biology at UAB said during a June 18 news briefing.
Momeni and colleagues isolated ...
