Had great fun listening to medical students (Group 6) from Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine presenting on their Community Health Project (CHP) this morning. Naturally I felt that their project was the most important of all the ones done this year. Their findings on community carriage of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase […]
Another piece of work that has taken much effort and a long time to get published (now out in Scientific Reports), but certainly one that expanded my own understanding of how diverse techniques can contribute to our knowledge of infectious diseases. This work – looking at the distribution of reported cases of resident (defined locally […]
I was involved (extremely) peripherally in some work on chromosomal resistance islands in Acinetobacter baumannii by Prof Ruth Hall’s team at the University of Sydney, and part of that work has just been published. Basically, the team was investigating a 16S ribosomal RNA methyltransferase gene armA that conveys resistance to a broad array of aminoglycosides (including gentamicin […]
Like most other infectious disease physicians and microbiologists, I have been following the evolving global Mycobacterium chimaera outbreak with interest. I knew nothing about M. chimaera (or that it even existed) until last year. It is an interesting organism – a slow-growing non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM – a “catchall classification” that includes all mycobacteria other than those belonging to the Mycobacterium […]
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 […]
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 […]
Some musings at the end of the year, after 6 months back in the public sector following a short 2-year stint in the private sector as an infectious diseases physician. This series will probably be (infrequently) updated and extended over time. My experience is primarily with acute hospital-based care, largely through the lens of the […]
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