The two essay competitions have officially started! Essays may be submitted to the following email addresses anytime before 31st August 2018, 2359H – mdchly@nus.edu.sg and idsg50feedback@gmail.com – more details are available at the SSHSPH website here.
The talented staff at SSHSPH have put up the webpage for the student essay contests here, including the rather psychedelic designs (reproduced below). We have an additional co-organizer/sponsor in SGH Microbiology this year, with a second whimsical topic on personal microbiomes included by the SGH Microbiology blogger. Other than age categories and the themes, the […]
My colleagues (from SSHSPH) and I had performed a review of leptospirosis a few months back, and coincidentally I was asked to provide some input for the mainstream media (behind a paywall). It is a very interesting infection from the academic/clinical perspective, and there are a number of excellent reviews, notably here and here (behind […]
An intriguing study was published in last month’s New England Journal of Medicine. It was picked up by several news agencies, including Wired which published a piece by science journalist Maryn McKenna (the author of the “Big Chicken” book) that briefly made it to the top of Digg. A large cluster randomized trial of 1,533 communities […]
While preparing for a recent talk, I did a brief search for articles on bacterial antibiotic resistance prior to the development of modern day antibiotics. We understand that bacteria predate humans by a few billion years, and many of today’s antibiotics are derived from molecules made by fungi (i.e. penicillin and cephalosporins) and soil bacteria […]
Saw this article in the Straits Times this morning, and was reminded that I had wanted to follow up on the issue of drug resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoeae. There has not been a case of “super gonorrhoea” in Singapore to my knowledge, but it is a matter of time before such cases appear locally. Neisseria gonorrhoeae is […]
Following on last year’s essay and video contest on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), we are organizing another essay contest supported by the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, and Singapore General Hospital. The contest will open on 1st June 2018, with the final date of submission of essays being 31st August 2018. […]
Had an opportunity to give a presentation on influenza vaccination at the local School of Public Health‘s Health and Safety Day yesterday, and so had to read up a bit. Influenza is a highly contagious illness caused by the influenza virus, of which there are four main types that we know of, although we primarily […]
Recent outbreaks in Singapore made me wonder whether there is a paradigm for an effective way of communicating an outbreak (a subset of risk communication) to healthcare professionals and the general public. This is perhaps especially relevant in the context of the current focus on fake news. The ubiquity of social media and messaging platforms […]
Lassa fever is a zoonotic viral haemorrhagic fever that is endemic to West Africa. It is caused by the Lassa virus, which is named after a small town in Nigeria where the virus was first discovered in 1969 (although the disease has been around far longer than that). The story of that discovery is present […]
MIPHIDIC 