RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 



Mission 1 . The first mission provided us the opportunity to test our 

 methodology and procedures in obtaining and handling the bacterial 

 culture. If adjustments were indicated in the microbiological portion 

 of the project changes could be instituted at St. John or Oakland before 

 the longer three phase missions started. 



The data will be presented under three main headings: Aerobiology, 

 Human Microbiology and Discussion. 



Aerobiology; Crew quarters . The sampling schedule in the crew-bridge 

 compartment was on a daily basis using two air samplers to collect the 

 general bacterial population and a selected bacterial component. The 

 total bacterial counts/ft^ for the TSA and Marine media are presented 

 in Fig. 1. The general bacterial population, those able to grow on TSA 

 medium, was in a normal range during most of the mission with a moderate 

 elevation on day 12 to 50/ft-^. The marine bacterial population, those 

 able to grow oa 2216, was slightly elevated on day five to 37/ft-^ but 

 less than 10/ft on the other samples. The ability of the later popula- 

 tion to grow on a marine medium, having sea water salts incorporated in 

 its formulation, may be interpreted as a necessity for some of these 

 colonies since this entire population is not measured on the fresh water 

 medium. This is noted in the differences of the two populations. How- 

 ever, some of the organisms growing on the 2216 medium may not be so 

 demanding in their salinity requirements and may have the capability of 

 growing on the TSA. 



No Staphylococcus aureus or Pseudomonas aeruginosa were isolated from 

 the air on the selected media. 



The total fungi count was recorded from the TSA medium and is presented 

 in Fig. 2. There were two peaks during the mission, on days 5-6 at a 

 level of 20/ft3 and day 9 at 16/ft3, Two types of fungi comprise the 

 first peak while the second peak consisted of a single type of fungus 

 but different than the other two. The fungi were not specifically 

 identified but were common saprophites. 



The entire bacterial population growing on selected air samples were 

 collected from all six stages of the samplers and were identified to 

 group or genera for correlative purposes. The Chi square test was 

 applied to the distributions obtained from the TSA and 2216 media and 

 showed a difference in the distributions of the two media at a con- 

 fidence level of less than 0.1%, i.e. the two media were recovering 

 different population distributions. This was not mutually exclusive 

 since an organism growing on one medium was not excluded from growing on 

 the other. 



The bacterial distribution of day 2-TSA is presented in Table 1. The 

 Pseudomonas types I, II, III and IV are according to Shewan, Hobbs, & 

 Hodgkiss (1960) with type I being Ps^. aeruginosa . The bacterial 



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