A couple of years ago, I received an email from Rubriq offering me the opportunity to be paid for performing peer review on pre-submission journal manuscripts. Rubriq’s mission is not a bad one, which is to reduce redundancies in the manuscript submission and journal review process. Basically, if one has a biological or medical manuscript (they […]
The Singapore General Hospital (SGH) Diagnostic Bacteriology section’s official blog had recently described the change in healthcare-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) clones in our local hospitals, with a shift from a near-complete monopoly by ST239-MRSA-III to a duopoly between the older clone and ST22-MRSA-IV (or UK-EMRSA-15) within a period of 10 years from 2001 to 2010. I like […]
A major highlight of working on the Singapore MRSA evolution and competition study was obtaining the very old MRSA isolates from the 1980’s and 1990’s. One of the biggest issues in the Singapore clinical microbiology scene – to me – is the loss of historical isolates (and the lack of any attempts to correct this to […]
Two days ago, our paper on the “Evolution dynamics of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in a healthcare system” was published in the BiomedCentral journal Genome Biology. We sequenced the genomes of 260 clinical MRSA isolates cultured over 3 decades (1982 to 2010) in four Singaporean hospitals – a number that seemed really high back in 2011, but […]
I was directed by the SGH microbiology blog‘s chief blogger to the Straits Times report yesterday detailing the National Environment Agency (NEA)’s tender for studying the effects of using Wolbachia-carrying male mosquitoes to combat dengue in Singapore. But what is Wolbachia? It is a fascinating genus of bacteria that exists solely as a parasitic (or in some cases mutualistic) […]
This is written as a closure (for now) for the previous influenza articles (here and here), which reported on the influenza A(H3N2) epidemic in the U.S.A and the similar high proportion of influenza A(H3N2) among the Singapore influenza isolates that were typed. Various indicators suggest that the epidemic in the U.S.A. is coming to an […]
Interpretation of syphilis serological results is one of the more common reasons for referrals to infectious disease physicians in Singapore. Back in the restructured hospitals, syphilis serology was usually performed as part of a panel for patients with altered mental status, or occasionally for those with cerebrovascular accidents or peripheral neuropathy (because neurosyphilis may present with such features). […]
The big news for antimicrobial resistance over the past week has been the decision by McDonald’s (the fast food chain) to use only antibiotic-free chicken in 2 years’ time. This will only affect the U.S. branches, although the company is also exploring phasing this in Europe. No signs of this happening in Singapore or the […]
Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) looks set to becoming Singapore’s biggest antibiotic-resistant bacterial challenge for the immediate future, even more so than other members of the multidrug-resistant bacteria “alphabet soup”, viz. MRSA, VRE, XDR-AB, XDR-PA, etc. What is one unexpected consequence of having patients with CRE in our hospitals? Well, it gets into our sewage system. I have […]
MIPHIDIC 