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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was first discovered on 2nd October 1960 by Prof Margaret Patricia Jevons at the Public Health Laboratory in Collindale, London, UK. Methicillin (or celbenin as it was also known as then) became available for prescription in 1959, and the conventional narrative has always been that MRSA arose as a consequence of […]
I was involved (extremely) peripherally in some work on chromosomal resistance islands in Acinetobacter baumannii by Prof Ruth Hall’s team at the University of Sydney, and part of that work has just been published. Basically, the team was investigating a 16S ribosomal RNA methyltransferase gene armA that conveys resistance to a broad array of aminoglycosides (including gentamicin […]
Like most other infectious disease physicians and microbiologists, I have been following the evolving global Mycobacterium chimaera outbreak with interest. I knew nothing about M. chimaera (or that it even existed) until last year. It is an interesting organism – a slow-growing non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM – a “catchall classification” that includes all mycobacteria other than those belonging to the Mycobacterium […]
One of our little hobby projects – alluded to in my previous post on drug-resistant bugs in pork and beef – has finally been published in a local academic journal. There is quite a lot of published data on the presence of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Enterobacteriaceae in food animals, particularly chicken. What about in Singapore? We […]
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