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 […]
Visited Phnom Penh for the first time last week as part of a delegation from the School of Public Health (the School has a Tuberculosis Control in Cambodia Programme that it implements in partnership with the University of Health Sciences in Cambodia as well as the famous London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). It […]
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 […]
Naturally, this is biased by what I know and has been reported. But here is what I feel are the significant events in 2016. Outbreaks These are the most easily recalled and form the biggest group of infectious disease events by far. The major outbreaks this year include: Rotavirus gastroenteritis at Pek Kio Market affecting […]
I had the pleasure of reading about Singapore’s decision to develop a national action plan against antimicrobial resistance on the front page of the Straits Times yesterday. It is rare that antimicrobial resistance gets featured so prominently, so kudos to the Straits Times and reporters like Carolyn Khew who are willing to write about these […]
I had previously mentioned that private sector specialists in Singapore are independent operators – the majority actually run their own clinics/practice as individuals. Most professional partnerships between doctors have been small in scale (i.e. 2 or 3 individual doctors), and a good number of such partnerships have come apart because of personal differences or the […]
I read icddr,b’s (the acronym for the famous International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh) blog post recently about their ongoing work on antimicrobial resistance. The work is impressive and very relevant to the situation in that country, and the post also brought back memories of a time 6 years ago when I was in […]
Attending the 10th edition of the biennial Singapore AIDS Conference at the NUHS Tower Block. A remarkable achievement – both the conference itself, as well as the progress made in Singapore over 31 years (our first local case of HIV was diagnosed in May 1985). Such progress is testament to the passion and efforts of […]
A study published in JAMA this week showed that antibiotics were the most common cause of adverse drug events in younger (age <65 years) patients presenting to the emergency departments of 58 sentinel hospitals in the US, and the second most common cause in those above 65 years of age. As a whole, an adverse […]
I spent a pleasant afternoon yesterday listening to various presentations on completed and semi-completed projects at the SIDI Research Symposium at Waterfront Copthorne (Declaration: I am the current director of the Singapore Infectious Diseases Initiative, or SIDI for short). The projects were very diverse in nature, ranging from basic science to clinical research as well […]
MIPHIDIC 