Second last plug for our essay and video contest, jointly organised by the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health and Ngee Ann Polytechnic, funded by many generous donors to our Antibiotics Awareness Fund. Details and replies to some queries below: Any original video 3 minutes or shorter, on the above theme. Group participation welcome […]
Certain malaria parasites have the ability to form a dormant liver stage, known as the hypnozoite – from the Greek words “hypnos” (sleep) and “zoon” (animal). In human malaria, some of the Plasmodium vivax and P. ovale sporozoites entering the blood from the bite of an infected Anopheles mosquito will remain behind in the liver as hypnozoites (the others develop into […]
A teenager developed persistent high fever (up to 39.5 degrees Celsius) two weeks after returning from a trip to a national park in Brunei. The other nine students and teacher-counsellor remained well other than occasional bouts of gastroenteritis. The school excursion had lasted a week, with two days spent camping in tents within the national […]
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 […]
A whimsical piece below, with the caveat that different major outbreaks pose different investigative challenges and scientific questions. Good to have the opinions and thoughts of others. I have been involved in a few major outbreaks in Singapore over the past decade-and-half, and have often wondered whether it is better to organise and write up […]
The last author of the above study pointed out that there were five – and not four – studies from Singapore published in the May supplementary issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases. A clear oversight on my part. The study – which was conducted at the National University Hospital (NUH) – evaluated the accuracy of an algorithm […]
A middle-aged man with newly diagnosed diabetes mellitus presented with sudden onset right eye pain and tearing 2 days ago. This was associated with fever a day later, and he was unable to open his right eye fully because of the eyelid swelling. He had no history of trauma to the eye, no contact history […]
The detailed report on Singapore’s multi-faceted approach at containing and investigating last year’s Zika outbreak has finally been published online at Lancet Infectious Diseases. I had written superficially about some of the events in a series of blog posts at that time, but this published work describes comprehensively both the clinical and public health aspects of managing […]
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 […]
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 […]
MIPHIDIC 