Breast surgery is becoming more common around the world. For women who’ve been diagnosed with cancer, the operation is a medical necessity. But more and more women are choosing to have cosmetic surgery to either increase or decrease the size of their breasts. Researcher Margaret Olsen from Washington University in St. Louis was investigating infections after all kinds of surgeries when she noticed something: women had an unusual number of infections after breast surgery. “Breast surgery is the type of surgery that we don’t expect to have a lot of infections occurring after the surgery because it’s an area of the body that doesn’t normally have a lot of bacteria there,” Olsen explains. “It’s not something like operating in the mouth or the colon where we have a lot of normal bacteria, and so you would expect to have a lot of infections after those surgeries.” Read more