A field guide to dangerous bacteria

This week I’m excited to announce a special project! During the past year and a half I’ve been working with the wonderful people at Nerdcore Medical on a set of 20 medical infographics.

Nerdcore Medical is the studio behind science communication projects like the Bacterionomicon and the Occam’s Razor card game. For this project I worked with Dr. Arun Mathews, a chief medical officer in Texas.

We wanted to make a set of beautiful posters that would combine art with study guides for medical school exams. This first one is an ID guide to common bacterial infections in human patients. The flowchart shows the steps you would take to identify a bacterial infection, and what each of the results might mean.

I’d never really thought much about lab tests before, so this was a really fun infographic to research and put together. Arun was an amazing collaborator - he fact-checked every single poster, picked the most important medical topics to cover, and even sent me reference books used by medical students.

Most of our posters are pretty specific to the medical field, but I’m going to be posting some of my favorites on this blog as they’re released. If you’re into medical infographics I would definitely recommend checking out the Nerdcore Medical Patreon to see the complete set of our work.

• Sources

• First Aid for the USMLE Book 1 (2015). Tao Le and Vikas Bhushan. © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education.
• Virtual Interactive Bacteriology Laboratory. Michigan State university. © 2010 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. East Lansing, MI 48824
• CDC & Public Health Agency of Canada Pathogen Safety Data Sheets: Actinomyces, Nocardia, Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium, Listeria monocytogenes, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, Pasteurella, Brucella, Bordetella pertussis, Enterobacter, Klebsiella, Bacillus, Corynebacterium, Streptococcus pyogenes, Citrobacter, Serratia, Salmonella, Yersinia enterocolitica, Streptococcus agalactiae, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Neisseria meningitidis, Campylobacter jejuni, Vibrio cholerae, Helicobacter pylori, Shigella, Enterococcus faecalis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa.