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 […]
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 […]
I had the distinct pleasure of chairing the final panel of the workshop “Disease Across Species: The Science, Ethics, and Anthropology of One Health” organised by the enterprising Mr Zohar Lederman and Dr Lyle Fearnley of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics (NUS) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) respectively. The panel was refreshingly […]
Our short letter on a macaque-specific clone of MRSA is now available on the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (paywall). The story is quite an interesting one. Three years ago, one of the macaques used in neurosurgical research at the SingHealth Experimental Medicine Centre (SEMC) developed a wound infection (the monkeys went around with what looked like metal […]
The following court case, described in the Australian Doctor (behind a paywall) was brought to my attention by an old friend. Essentially, a young boy slipped on wet concrete and developed an open fracture of his thumb in 2011. He was treated at a Sydney hospital, receiving IV flucloxacillin as the antibiotic stewardship guideline-recommended prophylaxis […]
The Longitude Prize is 10 million GBP prize fund that will be awarded to the person or team that solves one of the greatest issues of our time. It was developed 300 years after the original British Longitude Prize – a challenge set by the British Government in 1714 to measure the longitude accurately. The […]
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