Unveiling Manitoba’s (un)official microbe

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/08/2018 (2791 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Get ready to be hugely excited about something extremely small, because today I am going to announce the big winner in Doug’s Pick Manitoba’s Official Microbe Contest.

This is the contest I launched last week after stumbling on online news reports stating that New Jersey (slogan: “We have Bruce Springsteen and you don’t!”) was poised to declare its official state microbe.

In an effort to become only the second state to pay tribute to a microscopic organism too small to be seen with the naked eye, New Jersey’s Senate has approved a bill that would honour Streptomyces griseus as state microbe.

By way of background, this microbe, discovered in New Jersey in 1943, produces the compound streptomycin, the first antibiotic discovered on American soil, one that kills the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid and dysentery.

A lot of other states have been debating designating state microbes, but the only one that has previously passed a bill is Oregon, which, in 2013, chose Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer’s yeast) as state microbe because of its significance in the state’s craft beer industry.

In holding a contest to pick our own Manitoba microbe, the general thrust of my gist was that if all these U.S. states could celebrate some microscopic organism that no one has ever heard of, then so could we.

As a crusading newspaper columnist, I found it hard to understand why we have a provincial flower (the prairie crocus), a provincial fish (the walleye), a provincial bird (the great grey owl), and a provincial tree (the white spruce), but we do not have a provincial microbe.

The response to my Manitoba microbe contest was heart-warming in the sense that many great readers (well, at least a dozen of you) apparently have a lot of free time on your hands, which you used to send in thoughtful nominations for your favourite bacterium or other potentially lethal or beneficial microscopic organisms.

As the official judge of the contest, the first thing I did was to see whether anyone had offered me money in exchange for picking their microbe (no one did) and then I read each entry and picked the one that touched me deep in my soul, without giving me some manner of communicable disease.

Before we get to the big winner, let’s review some of the other entries, all of which will receive an autographed copy of my cheesy book, Bite-Sized Doug.

For starters, there was a lot of love for Borrelia burgdorferi, the tick-borne parasite that causes Lyme disease. “It sounds like a burger, but can cause Lyme disease, so you know it can be found in Manitoba,” Paula Ritchie wrote in her entry. “Lyme disease is something all Manitobans should be aware of and protect themselves and their pets from.”

Reader Kathleen Crang was like-minded in her support of this hazardous bug. “Hands down, this biological evil genius should bear the flag,” Kathleen said in her email. “You probably know it as Lyme disease, and might not think it deserves such a prestigious title. However, this Trojan Horse or Pearl Harbor, if you prefer, continues to make its sneaky attack on Manitobans.

“It has been around for thousands of years, has plagued thousands, and will continue to. Ötzi the Iceman had a Lyme infection… Winnipeg was declared endemic for Lyme in June 2014, yet most people aren’t aware. A swell prize for this winning microbe would be increased public awareness.”

Debbie Nielsen made a passionate pitch for another truly scary little fellow, namely EBOV, “a microbial virus combination of filoviruses that cause the dreaded Ebola.

“This pathogen put Winnipeg on the research map when the National Microbiology Lab on Arlington Street was given millions to study it, thereby saving so many people in the world from the scourge of this disease,” Debbie said. “Hoping to win a copy of your book!”

I was also deeply moved by a heartfelt entry sent in by Michael Ilyniak, one that transported me back in time to the days I spent in high school biology class staring at some little blobs under a high-powered microscope.

“I nominate paramecium,” Michael wrote. “It was the first microbe I could identify back at Immaculate Heart of Mary School in the early 1960s. The science topic was taught to us by Sister Chrysantha in elementary school (a sweet nun who would nod off at times).

“Anyway, it’s perfect for Manitoba’s official microbe because it is readily found scooped up from any pond or ditch, it’s shaped like the sole of a moccasin… it moves gracefully on the slide of a microscope, and therefore a perfect fit.”

Which somehow brings us to our grand prize winner, which was sent in by Allan Appel, who persuaded me that the multi-drug-resistant superbug Enterococcus faecium should be designated Manitoba’s provincial microbe, even though most of us would never want to meet it in person.

“This bug is becoming immune to the hand sanitizers that are used everywhere, but are especially dangerous in hospitals, which depend upon sanitizers to keep everyone’s hands ‘clean,’ including patients, doctors and nurses,” Allan wrote. “Specifically, it is becoming immune to the main ingredient in these sanitizers — alcohol.

“Now why am I promoting a microbe that potentially could make life much more difficult for people who are already ill? Well, it is because hand sanitizers are really a half-hearted method of fighting germs; they give us a false sense of security by promoting the belief that by doing something so simple as using hand sanitizers, which are far less invasive to our lives than honest to goodness hand-washing — WITH SOAP, please — we are fighting the good fight against germs…

“The Enterococcus faecium, as an official microbe of the province, would raise awareness of the danger this complacency puts us in, with the further promotion of proper hand-washing the result… I would like Manitoba to be known as a national, nay, even an international leader in bringing this danger to the attention of the world.”

So, way to go Allan Appel. On behalf of all Manitobans, I thank you for alerting us to E. faecium. You have won a bunch of Free Press books and some swell passes to the Manitoba Museum and its cool hockey exhibit. I also have some tickets for the Lyme disease entrants, too.

Now, thankfully, we can all wash our hands of the difficult job of picking Manitoba’s provincial microbe. According to our winner, we should probably use soap.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca