The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance was commissioned in July 2014 by the U.K. government to analyse the global problem of antimicrobial resistance and to propose concrete steps to deal with it. A remarkably enlightened move, I may add, given that U.K is not actually one of the countries with high rates of antimicrobial resistance, and […]
Part of the pleasure of attending any large medical conference is viewing the trade exhibition. In ECCMID this year, the pharmaceutical industry is out in force but are outnumbered by the diagnostics companies. The trend continues towards point-of-care and easy to use diagnostics platforms. Next generation sequencing has not made it to prime time yet. […]
The annual European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases is going on now at the Amsterdam RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, and will end on 12th April. This meeting has grown from strength to strength, and now has more than 11,000 attendees each year. Attending the session on individualised management of invasive […]
Back to the febrile neutropenia management series. Two questions frequently arise during the course of management, particularly with regards to febrile neutropenia (FN) in patients with haematological malignancies where the duration of neutropenia may be very long: In the presence of neutropenia, can there be “de-escalation” of antibiotic therapy if a sensitive bacterium is cultured […]
We move on from outpatient management of febrile neutropenia – which is backed by good science and is conceptually attractive but not straightforward to implement – to inpatient management of “high risk” (by MASCC or other criteria) febrile neutropenia, specifically in the area of antibiotic therapy. Here, there are a bewildering number of options (basically, […]
After the rates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections fell in patients with febrile neutropenia, it became tacit knowledge to many oncologists (and haematologists) that the majority of patients with febrile neutropenia – especially those with solid organ cancers – recovered uneventfully. How could this knowledge be codified into a predictive model that could reliably separate out patients at […]
Chemotherapy-induced febrile neutropenia is a life-threatening condition that remains common during the therapy of haematological malignancies, but has become far rarer for patients with solid tumours because of the increased use of targeted therapy. It is traditionally defined as a single oral temperature of 38.3ºC or a temperature of greater than 38.0ºC sustained for more […]
It is the last day of 2015, and therefore timely to reflect back on the significant events of the year. Oftentimes, the true impact of certain events are not known until much later in the future, and media hype (or lack thereof) creates its own bias which is hard to overcome. Here is a personal […]
I was privileged to be asked to contribute some thoughts on antimicrobial resistance for the December 2015 issue of the Royal College of Physicians (UK) Commentary Magazine. The article – well written by Iain Fossey – is not as interesting as the other feature article on English polymath magician John Dee’s (1527-1608) library that somehow ended […]
This week marks World Antibiotic Awareness Week (16th-22nd November 2015), the third since its inception in 2013. It had its genesis in the European Antibiotic Awareness Day, which originated on 18th November 2008, as well as the U.S. “Get Smart about Antibiotics” week (originally in October 2008). It serves as a way to increase public awareness […]
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