I attended an overseas panel review for health research professorships recently where the issue of declining rates of applications from “non-doctor clinicians” (nurses, pharmacists, other allied health professionals) was discussed. The funding body had already set in place measures to promote gender equality (if two candidates were nominated by an institute for the professorship, at […]
It is now well known that antibiotic use in animal husbandry far exceeds antibiotic use in humans. There is now considerable corporate and individual interest in reducing the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry – see for example McDonald’s (!) which even has a corporate vision for antibiotic stewardship in food animals. One issue is […]
A personal and primarily local look back at the year. What are the major infectious diseases events in modern Singapore in 2017? Outbreaks The World Health Organization (WHO) has a list of outbreaks by year on its website, and the 2017 list is depressingly long. There are the usual “suspects” like cholera (Africa) and diphtheria […]
In June last year, the Ministry of Health Singapore initiated a large-scale on-site voluntary tuberculosis (TB) screening for the residents of a 10-storey apartment block after a cluster of 6 multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) cases in the Block were diagnosed over the preceding 4 years. The results were released in an academic paper published in the […]
I was directed to this recently published Science article by a Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine clinician-scientist while we were discussing the Dengvaxia debacle. As highlighted in a previous post, Sanofi Pasteur had reported that dengue-naive people would be at higher risk of a more severe infection if they were infected with dengue following vaccination […]
A paper published in Lancet Infectious Diseases (behind a paywall) by researchers from the Institut Pasteur and the French National Reference Centre for Escherichia coli, Shigella and Salmonella generated much buzz online among those interested in antimicrobial resistance. They had studied 288 historical (1911-1969) isolates of Salmonella enterica serotype Typhimurium – a zoonotic bacterium that is one of the most common causes of non-typhoidal Salmonella […]
Sanofi-Pasteur released a media report on 29 November, warning that dengue-naive people would be at higher risk of a more severe infection if they were infected with dengue following vaccination with Dengvaxia – Sanofi Pasteur’s dengue vaccine that is also licensed for use in Singapore. This warning was based on the analysis of 6 years […]
It is one week after World Antibiotic Awareness Week. Nonetheless, raising awareness of antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance is an ongoing process, and the team led by Dr Clarence Tam from the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health set up their stations at Marine Parade Public Library this weekend. The library did not see as […]
It has been quite a long wait, but finally, investigators from the Environmental Health Institute (EHI – a part of the National Environment Agency) and the Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) have published their work on tracing the source of the unusual ST283 Group B Streptococcus (GBS) that caused the huge raw freshwater fish-associated […]
MIPHIDIC 