In 2008, a few colleagues and I wrote a position paper on antibiotic use and antimicrobial resistance in Singapore, making a number of recommendations which we felt would be important to improve antibiotic use and mitigate the threat of antimicrobial resistance here. Those were not particularly controversial recommendations, and reflected the thinking of the international […]
I was asked to write a commentary on adult vaccination in Singapore, during the course of which I read a number of articles surrounding adult vaccinations in general and Singapore in particular. A handful of things stood out for me: There is no clear or easy way to find the data on vaccination rates among […]
I had the privilege of attending a tour of the former Communicable Diseases Centre/Middleton Hospital today, organized by Jerome Lim of the Long and Winding Road and the Singapore Land Authority. CDC has now been added to the series of tours of state-owned sites (Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets) that includes old Changi Hospital and […]
This topic was previously touched on 2 years ago. The speculation at that time was whether hepatitis E in Singapore is also linked to the consumption of undercooked pork. This seems to be answered by a new study (behind a pay wall) that has just been published in the journal Zoonoses Public Health by investigators […]
A belated post on the announcement on 9th July that UK will be testing a subscription model for antibiotics that hopes to encourage the pharmaceutical industry to develop new antibiotics in the future. The background to this is that – unlike most other drugs and medical devices – there is acknowledged market failure where antibiotics […]
For the past several weeks, dengue has been in the news because of the surge in cases – the highest for the past several years. The National Environment Agency (NEA) has attributed this to three main factors: An increase in the Aedes aegypti (the primary vector for the dengue virus in Singapore) population in Singapore. […]
Last “advertisement” for these two student essay contests, jointly organized by the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore General Hospital, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering. Contest details are available here (AMR) and here (Microbiome). All students of schools in Singapore are welcome. All essays to be submitted […]
Last week, Singapore experienced its first case of monkeypox in the form of a tourist from Nigeria who developed symptoms only after having spent several days in town. Monkeypox is endemic in west and central Africa, probably maintained in multiple rodent populations with occasional animal-to-human transmission. An excellent review of human cases was published in […]
Both contests open for essay submissions from 1st June 2019. This is the third edition of the contests, jointly organized by the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore General Hospital, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering. Contest details are available here (AMR) and here (Microbiome). All students of […]
A souvenir from a bright PhD student who had bought this off the counter at a pharmacy in a neighbouring country. When I did pharmacology in medical school decades ago, we were taught that this antibiotic was not commonly used because side effects (like antibiotic-associated diarrhea) were frequent. One would be hard pressed to find […]
MIPHIDIC 