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Working with earth in the school garden

Question
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
at the school of my daughter, the children should help in the next days to lay out a school garden. For this, they should put plants and seeds into the earth - it can therefore be assumed, that it will be burrowed intensively in the earth.
Is it advisable for our daughter, to help here or it there the danger, to catch bacteria from the earth? I remember hereby an article from the USA, in that it had been reported, that after intensive ground works besides a hospital, children suffering from CF got severly infected with germs (Burkholderia?)....
Many thanks for your help.
Answer
Dear questioner,
unfortunately it is only very hardly possible to answer this question concretely. Among the germs being relevant for CF patients, primarily Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Burkholderia cepacia can occur in the ground. On the basis of available data one can assume, that for transmission of P. aeruginosa, humid habitations (water reservoirs) play probably a markedly greater role than the contact to ground. For Burkholderia it has been shown, that especially samples of earth can be contaminated with this germ. Which constellation leads in the end to an infection (i.e. how and where a patient gets one of the named germs), remains unclear in most of the cases, so that the risk of infection can only hardly be estimated in case of contact with different environmental samples respectivly possible sources of infection. Furthermore, the amount of germs can obviously differ markedly depending on the environmental conditions (climate, time of the year, humidity, nutrients etc.). For Burkholderia cepaica it has also been shown, that the types of the germ detected in CF patients (MLST-types) are even under-represented in environmental samples. Studies from Germany about the contamination of earth samples with B. cepacia are not known to me.
In so far the risk, that your child could get infected during the limited "work with earth" for the lay out of a school garden, cannot be excluded. I judge the risk however to be low, under the condition, that attention is paid on very good hand hygiene and it is not worked at the same time with water so that aerosols could emerge.
Best regards,
Michael Hogardt
21.07.2014