Had great fun listening to medical students (Group 6) from Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine presenting on their Community Health Project (CHP) this morning. Naturally I felt that their project was the most important of all the ones done this year.

The lecture theatre was fully packed with medical students attending the CHP presentations

An incredible 26.2% of HDB dwellers who provided rectal swabs for this project were found to be ESBL-producing Enterobacteriaceae carriers.

Group 6’s recommendations for improving awareness of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance among public and healthcare professionals.

Their findings on community carriage of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Enterobacteriaceae (ESBL-E) was surprising, and should hopefully be confirmed via other similar studies. The last similar study locally – albeit in an emergency department setting – was conducted 10 years ago. That study found that 12.4% of 1,006 subjects recruited from TTSH emergency department were ESBL-E carriers, including 6.3% of the subpopulation of 95 with no history of healthcare contact. I had thought those rates were very high then.

I hope that this CHP will be formally published in an academic journal very soon. It is certainly an impressive study, with a lot of thought and hard work put in.