A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet up with Dr Piotr Chlebicki of Singapore General Hospital (SGH), and we discussed antimicrobial stewardship over a beer (or two). Antimicrobial stewardship – a more nuanced and acceptable term than “antimicrobial control” – refers to any number of interventions in a hospital setting that aims to […]
Coincidentally, on the same day I posted my mini-rant about responsibility for antimicrobial resistance, Prof. Michael Edmond, Richard P. Wenzel Professor of Internal Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University also wrote a post about the state of infection prevention programs (no longer “infection control programs”) in the U.S. at his influential blog. It is interesting to […]
Reading through several articles and reports on antimicrobial resistance, I came across a news story about a multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas outbreak linked to duodenoscopes at Huntington Memorial Hospital in the U.S.A. This is not the only outbreak linked to endoscopes this year – the more noteworthy event occurred at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Centre, with 7 ill and 2 […]
As the number of persons with vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) and/or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) colonisation or prior infection increases – both among locals and foreigners – there will be inevitably more of such colonised/infected persons that will have medical indications for high risk procedures such as organ or stem cell transplantation (HSCT). The issue at hand is […]
Dr. Kathryn Holt from the University of Melbourne published a very important paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday, using whole genome sequencing to study the population structure as well as virulence and antimicrobial resistance factors of Klebsiella pneumoniae. A total of 288 isolates from 6 countries (Australia, Indonesia, Laos, Singapore, U.S.A. […]
News about the G-7 Leaders’ Summit in Germany was somewhat overshadowed by the news about the South Korea MERS-CoV outbreak, at least in this part of the world. However, antimicrobial resistance was on the agenda, and can be found in the joint declaration by the leaders of G-7. The Annex to the Declaration can be found […]
To complete the MRSA discussion, it is necessary to mention the final group of MRSA – livestock-associated MRSA (LA-MRSA). Just as healthcare-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) and community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) are (at least initially) distinct from each other via differences in their genetic make-up, LA-MRSA represents yet another separate path of evolution for MRSA, with its own […]
The Singapore General Hospital Diagnostic Bacteriology Section blogger has just posted a succinct and comprehensive overview of community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) clones in Singapore. It seems like ancient history now, but CA-MRSA really rose into the global consciousness only in the early 21st century, when scientists from Europe (particularly the researchers from INSERM E0230, Lyon France – the […]
Several preceding posts (here, here and here) had described the change in healthcare-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) clones in the local setting, and either the SGH Diagnostic Bacteriology blog or I (or both) will probably write on community-associated MRSA clones in Singapore in the near future. But from a practical point of view, does it really matter […]
MIPHIDIC 