The Post-Antibiotic World Essay Contest jointly organized by the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health and Ngee Ann Polytechnic took place between 1st June and 30th August 2017. This event was more hotly contested and there were more than 50 essays submitted from both Secondary and Junior College/Polytechnic students. We were very fortunate to have 3 […]
It was a great privilege to be invited for the conference organised by the University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Medical Ethics and Law in collaboration with their School of Public Health. Titled “Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance: Meeting the Global Challenge of AMR”, the organizers had invited a formidable line-up of local and international speakers, one […]
Dr Lam Pin Min, Senior Minister of State for the Ministries of Health and Transport, announced the launch of our National Strategic Plan on AMR during his address at the Public Health Thought Leadership Dialogue (PHTLD) organized by the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health today. The document is available here, and broadly follows […]
Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH) announced the National Adult Immunization Schedule (NAIS) yesterday. This is a welcome extension of the National Childhood Immunization Programme (into adulthood), and the amendment to allow the use of Medisave (Singapore’s compulsory national medical savings scheme) for these vaccines (up to SGD400 a year) will facilitate take up of the […]
I wished to write about 2 remarkable popular science books on microbes and infectious diseases that I recently read. The first is British science journalist Ed Yong’s “I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life”. An extraordinary book – marred only by the slight (but perhaps understandable) hyperbole – on microbes […]
Before moving on, I thought it would be good to address the “tick issue”. There were a couple of Facebook comments about the Haemaphysalis longicornus photo from Wikipedia, and how this resembled the dog ticks that are prevalent in Singapore. I am by no means a tick expert, but I understand that the predominant tick in Singapore […]
Had to do quite a bit of reading up about this emerging but obscure (at least for Singapore) infectious disease recently. It is actually pretty interesting. Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is caused by a member of the Phlebovirus family – the eponymous SFTS virus. The first official report of this disease and its […]
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 […]
The follow-up debate (and backlash) to the BMJ article that hit the news just over 2 weeks ago would be interesting, I thought. And indeed it was. Out of 31 “Rapid Responses” to the article at BMJ itself at this point in time (almost all by physicians), 15 were against the conclusions of the article […]
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 […]
MIPHIDIC 