It was a great privilege to be invited for the conference organised by the University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Medical Ethics and Law in collaboration with their School of Public Health. Titled “Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance: Meeting the Global Challenge of AMR”, the organizers had invited a formidable line-up of local and international speakers, one […]
Dr Lam Pin Min, Senior Minister of State for the Ministries of Health and Transport, announced the launch of our National Strategic Plan on AMR during his address at the Public Health Thought Leadership Dialogue (PHTLD) organized by the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health today. The document is available here, and broadly follows […]
I attended the INFECTIONS 2017 conference in Putrajaya, Malaysia on 24th and 25th October. This biannual conference is organized by the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences of Universiti Putra Malaysia. It was a small friendly event. I enjoyed the great hospitality of the hosts, and learned much from the talks, as well as many […]
Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH) announced the National Adult Immunization Schedule (NAIS) yesterday. This is a welcome extension of the National Childhood Immunization Programme (into adulthood), and the amendment to allow the use of Medisave (Singapore’s compulsory national medical savings scheme) for these vaccines (up to SGD400 a year) will facilitate take up of the […]
A late middle-aged gentleman presented with painful left knee swelling for 2 weeks. He had recently been diagnosed with primary autoimmune hemolytic anaemia, for which he was on the final week of a 12-week tapering course of high-dose prednisolone. There was no associated fever or other systemic symptoms. He had not traveled in the preceding […]
I wished to write about 2 remarkable popular science books on microbes and infectious diseases that I recently read. The first is British science journalist Ed Yong’s “I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life”. An extraordinary book – marred only by the slight (but perhaps understandable) hyperbole – on microbes […]
Yesterday evening, I was privileged to be able to witness current world chess champion Magnus Carlsen in action. In an event organized by the Norwegian Business Association and Simonsen Vogt Wiig law firm, Carlsen played a simul exhibition against 16 opponents at the Norwegian Ambassador’s Residence. The “opposition” were all chess amateurs, ranging from novices […]
We did get a number of entries (far more than I expected!) for the inaugural Antibiotic Resistance Video Contest jointly organised by the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health and Ngee Ann Polytechnic. The closing date was on 30th September (potentially late, late entries – do contact the organisers directly), and now we are […]
Before moving on, I thought it would be good to address the “tick issue”. There were a couple of Facebook comments about the Haemaphysalis longicornus photo from Wikipedia, and how this resembled the dog ticks that are prevalent in Singapore. I am by no means a tick expert, but I understand that the predominant tick in Singapore […]
Had to do quite a bit of reading up about this emerging but obscure (at least for Singapore) infectious disease recently. It is actually pretty interesting. Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is caused by a member of the Phlebovirus family – the eponymous SFTS virus. The first official report of this disease and its […]
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