I was honoured to provide a citation for Prof Koh Tse Hsien, a.k.a. the microbiology blogger, yesterday. He is the fourth person invited to deliver the Monteiro lecture, which was established in 2012 by the Chapter of Infectious Diseases Physicians, College of Physicians, Academy of Medicine and the Society of Infectious Diseases (Singapore). The citation is […]
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 […]
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 […]
Finally had the chance to read Prof Teo You Yenn’s book “This Is What Inequality Looks Like”. It is essentially a compilation of essays based on her work among rental flat inhabitants in Singapore. What started as ethnographic research on poverty in Singapore quickly turned to study on both poverty and inequality, and how these […]
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 […]
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 