The Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp (Belgium) has been organizing annual colloquia since 1959. This year’s colloquium was on antibiotic resistance, and was held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, from 5th to 7th December. I was fortunate enough to be invited for the event, which featured speakers from the ITM (naturally) as well as regional and […]
And the top prize for the Post-Antibiotic World Essay Competition goes to Chan Ger Hui. Well-deserved! A Post-Antibiotic World It all started with one small holiday And one very small spore. Stray fungi growing on a petri dish Was soon to be so much more. Remember for this discovery Fleming— But forget not Florey, Chain, […]
The World Health Organization (WHO) has been visibly busy this month in the area of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The agency released a report on the global pipeline of new antibiotics (including anti-tuberculosis drugs) on 19th September. It can be downloaded here. There is also a new infographic on what WHO considers priority pathogens in addition […]
Played a bit role along with the SGH Department of Microbiology blogger in an Environmental Health Institute (EHI) study looking at Staphylococcus aureus isolates obtained from retail food and food handlers’ gloves in Singapore over the period 2011 to 2014. The work is now published in the open access journal Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control. […]
I was unfortunately not able to spend much time at the SIIDC, which is taking place now at the Waterfront Conference Centre at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel. This is actually the second such general infectious disease (ID) conference organized by the Singapore ID community, the first being the Courage Fund Infectious Diseases Conference which […]
An article published in the venerable British Medical Journal (BMJ) on Wednesday has been picked up by several news agencies. I had described this culture of doctors recommending that “antibiotic courses should be completed” in an earlier post on URTI, and how the doctors I had encountered all felt that failure to finish antibiotics would “result in […]
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 […]
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 […]
The SGH Department of Microbiology blogger has just uploaded a paper to biorXiv describing our little hobby project with staff and students from Ngee Ann Polytechnic. Out of 10 beef (Australia, NZ and Brazil) and 20 pork (Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia) samples from various local supermarkets, one MRSA (from a hunk of pork shoulder ostensibly […]
MIPHIDIC 