The long-held belief that urine is sterile is facing a serious challenge from new research combining sequencing techniques and an enhanced urine culturing protocol to uncover an array of uropathogens hitherto unseen in microbiology laboratories.

The notion that urine, indeed the entire bladder, is sterile is one medical students are still taught and “it’s a pretty deeply entrenched dogma,” says Linda Brubaker, MD, a urogynecologist and professor of obstetrics and gynecology and urology at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. She and a team of Loyola colleagues have worked for years to learn more about urinary microbiota and in the process demonstrated that currently standard urine culturing techniques fail to spot an alarmingly high proportion of uropathogens that may well be clinically relevant. Their findings were presented in June at the American Society for Microbiology’s Microbe meeting.

“What we’re going to do is replace the dogma that clinical care is based on,” Dr. Brubaker says. “There is a great deal of excitement because this is a vast unknown. It’s like discovering a tribe in the middle of the Amazon. We never knew these people were here, or how they eat, or how they live. We have to understand this [bacterial] community now—how it maintains health, how it deals with perturbations, like when patients are catheterized and a certain number of patients will get infections. Not all of them do. We may learn why some do and some don’t.”

My cover story in the August issue of CAP TODAY. Read the whole shebang.