World Antibiotic Awareness Week – an annual campaign supported by the World Health Organization – will take place in two weeks time, from 14th to 20th November 2016. The aim of the campaign is to “increase awareness of global antibiotic resistance and to encourage best practices among the general public, health workers and policy makers to […]
As promised from a previous blog post. I have been involved directly or indirectly in several academic papers where there was considerable unhappiness and acrimony over authorship, especially who should get first, last and corresponding author positions. Wikipedia actually has quite an informative article about academic authorship, including the potentially controversial area of authorship order in […]
Over the past year alone, I remember at least 3 separate occasions where various colleagues and I had discussed pooling data and otherwise complementary research results in order to put together a single, more comprehensive scientific story. What convinced people to collaborate was the chance to publish the work in a “journal with a higher […]
Shameless self-plug for a review article that colleagues in Asia and I published in Clinical Microbiology Reviews (behind the ASM pay-wall). The problem with estimates of antimicrobial resistance, particularly in Gram-negative bacteria such as or Acinetobacter baumannii, is that they tend to be outdated by the time the papers are published. I am sure ours are no […]
I had the pleasure of attending the 5th ICICAS held at Mandarin Orchard in Singapore from 19th to 21st October. Held every two years – which means this conference has been running for 10 years already – the programme this year was both innovative and interesting, and featured excellent international (and local, of course) speakers. […]
I have been waiting for this study (behind the Elsevier paywall) to be published for some time. In the largest and most detailed study to date, Dutch investigators followed up 2,001 travellers and 215 of their non-travelling household members for one year, and found that 34.3% of travellers had acquired extended-spectrum beta-lactamase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (ESBL-E) during their […]
Next Tuesday will be the start of the National Environment Agency’s (NEA’s) Project Wolbachia rollout. Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes will be released initially at Braddell Heights, followed by Nee Soon East and Tampines West as small scale trials of both efficacy and mosquito behaviour. As I understand it, there are three major dengue control strategies involving Wolbachia-infected Aedes […]
It was both a surprise and an honour to be invited for the lecture organised by the Science and Innovation Team of the British High Commission. Prof Sally Davies has been UK’s chief medical officer (equivalent in rank to permanent secretary in the civil service) since 2010, the first woman to attain that position. The […]
The number of reported Zika cases in Singapore has plunged over the past couple of weeks, as can be seen from the National Environment Agency’s website (screenshot below). Only one cluster – the original Aljunied-Sims Drive area – remains active (with new cases being reported) currently. How much of this is due to actual control […]
The recent post on the Dengvaxia vaccine raised several interesting questions. A prominent local professor of medicine pointed out that the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Member States Dengue Vaccination Advocacy Steering Committee (ADVASC) is actually supported by an unrestricted educational grant from Sanofi-Pasteur, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures and sells Dengvaxia. In […]
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