I recently gave a talk on antibiotic prescribing in primary care, and had a great discussion with many of the general practitioners (GPs) who attended the course (on a separate note, it is not at all clear that the best people to talk to GPs about antibiotic prescribing in primary care are hospital-based infectious diseases […]
Like many, I marvelled at the scope and ambition of the Hospital Microbiome Project, which is a large-scale longitudinal study of the microbial ecology of the Center for Care and Discovery (a hospital belonging to the University of Chicago), beginning from 2 months before the hospital’s opening in 2013 and stopping only 1 year afterwards. The […]
I was asked to provide some comments for the local Chinese newspaper Lianhe Zaobao on antibacterial product recently, and the article was published two days ago (in Chinese). I am glad that the other people who commented, including another ID physician (Dr Changa from Raffles Hospital), a dermatologist, and a Watson’s pharmacist, all basically said […]
A whimsical piece below, with the caveat that different major outbreaks pose different investigative challenges and scientific questions. Good to have the opinions and thoughts of others. I have been involved in a few major outbreaks in Singapore over the past decade-and-half, and have often wondered whether it is better to organise and write up […]
The last author of the above study pointed out that there were five – and not four – studies from Singapore published in the May supplementary issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases. A clear oversight on my part. The study – which was conducted at the National University Hospital (NUH) – evaluated the accuracy of an algorithm […]
A middle-aged man with newly diagnosed diabetes mellitus presented with sudden onset right eye pain and tearing 2 days ago. This was associated with fever a day later, and he was unable to open his right eye fully because of the eyelid swelling. He had no history of trauma to the eye, no contact history […]
The detailed report on Singapore’s multi-faceted approach at containing and investigating last year’s Zika outbreak has finally been published online at Lancet Infectious Diseases. I had written superficially about some of the events in a series of blog posts at that time, but this published work describes comprehensively both the clinical and public health aspects of managing […]
The final of the four Singapore papers in the May supplementary issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, and by no means the least, focused on carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) in inpatients from public hospitals in Singapore. The majority of the data are from a cohort study, aptly titled CaPES (Carbapenemase-Producing Enterobacteriaceae in Singapore), initiated in 2013 to […]
The third of four Singapore papers in the latest supplementary issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases on Infection Prevention in the Asia-Pacific is also based on work funded by the now defunct Communicable Diseases Public Health Research Grant from the Ministry of Health. The lead investigator – A/Prof Angela Chow from the Department of Clinical Epidemiology […]
Broadly defined, healthcare-associated infections (HAIs, also termed “hospital-acquired infections” or “nosocomial infections”) are infections that occur during the process of care in a healthcare facility, most commonly a hospital. They are an important quality indicator for healthcare institutions – conceptually, one would not really wish to be treated at a hospital where one’s risk of acquiring an […]
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