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resistance, particularly in Gram-negative bacteria such as or Acinetobacter baumannii, is that they tend to be outdated by the time the papers are published.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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Held jointly with the 11th Singapore Public Health & Occupational Medicine Conference at the Waterfront Copthorne Hotel. I managed to attend the opening and initial lectures yesterday morning. Dr Amy Khor, the Senior Minister of State, Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources & Ministry of Health, was once again the guest of honour (as […]
I read the SGH Department of Microbiology’s official blog’s post on Candida auris and marvelled at the extent of quality control that was portrayed and was also implicit in the identification of the yeast – twice, identifications thrown up by biochemical tests (API20) and the machine “black box” VITEK 2 were rejected by conscientious laboratory staff, who went […]
The Zika epidemic in Singapore appears to be progressing towards endemicity. As of yesterday, there are 387 confirmed cases, with 9 clusters. Among the confirmed cases are 16 pregnant women, and the Ministry of Health has announced plans to set up a national surveillance programme to monitor the development of babies born to these and […]
MIPHIDIC 