The European Society of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) regularly organizes educational courses, the vast majority of which are held in Europe. This year, however, their postgraduate course on tuberculosis and mycobacterial disease was held in Singapore from 26th to 28th September, in NUS. Although other specialties (particularly the oncologists) have organized regional editions […]
A small update to a post 3 years ago in air travel and tuberculosis. There has not been much in the way of new evidence since 2015. There was a publication in 2017 by the Japanese, detailing contact investigations on 42 index TB cases that had boarded a plane between 2012 and 2015, resulting in […]
On 26th September, the United Nations General Assembly held its first ever High Level Meeting on Ending TB. This is the second UN General Assembly in 2 years to focus on an infectious disease issue, the earlier event being on antimicrobial resistance in 2016. One of the reasons for the meeting was that even though […]
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 […]
More a spot diagnosis than a vignette per se. Urine in the urine bag and tubing. There is no overt bleeding. Question: What condition is being treated here? [Updated 29th September 2017] This is quite a classic – bright orange urine as a result of rifampicin ingestion (for tuberculosis). Sweat and tears may also be […]
I was unfortunately not able to spend much time at the SIIDC, which is taking place now at the Waterfront Conference Centre at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel. This is actually the second such general infectious disease (ID) conference organized by the Singapore ID community, the first being the Courage Fund Infectious Diseases Conference which […]
An article published in the venerable British Medical Journal (BMJ) on Wednesday has been picked up by several news agencies. I had described this culture of doctors recommending that “antibiotic courses should be completed” in an earlier post on URTI, and how the doctors I had encountered all felt that failure to finish antibiotics would “result in […]
On a whim, I decided to check out the statistics for the videos on Singapore and Infectious Diseases that we produced as part of the SG50 celebrations in 2015. They were uploaded on YouTube just over a year and half ago – an item off the bucket list! I still think the final video was […]
Today is World TB Day, and this is the 36th edition since it was first inaugurated on 24th March 1982 by WHO and the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD). 135 years ago, Robert Koch presented perhaps the most important of his multiple seminal works, “Über Tuberkulose”, to the scientists gathered at the […]
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 […]
MIPHIDIC 