I had the distinct pleasure of chairing the final panel of the workshop “Disease Across Species: The Science, Ethics, and Anthropology of One Health” organised by the enterprising Mr Zohar Lederman and Dr Lyle Fearnley of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics (NUS) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) respectively. The panel was refreshingly […]
A middle-aged post-menopausal woman who was previously well presented with intermittent fever and lower abdominal pain for a month. She had lost 3 kg over this time time period. She had otherwise no symptoms suggestive of urinary tract infection, no change in bowel habits and no significant discharge per vagina. Clinical examination revealed mild tenderness […]
Our short letter on a macaque-specific clone of MRSA is now available on the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (paywall). The story is quite an interesting one. Three years ago, one of the macaques used in neurosurgical research at the SingHealth Experimental Medicine Centre (SEMC) developed a wound infection (the monkeys went around with what looked like metal […]
A middle-aged man presented with pruritus ani (i.e. irritation of the skin around the anus) for several months. He had been healthy and well until he developed a bad bout of diarrhoea from a trip to a nearby country half a year ago, where he has spent a week with other volunteers helping to build […]
The following court case, described in the Australian Doctor (behind a paywall) was brought to my attention by an old friend. Essentially, a young boy slipped on wet concrete and developed an open fracture of his thumb in 2011. He was treated at a Sydney hospital, receiving IV flucloxacillin as the antibiotic stewardship guideline-recommended prophylaxis […]
Arising from a brief but wonkish post-round tea discussion. These are pharmacodynamic effects of antibiotics that inform both dosing and clinical decisions while treating bacterial infections, although they are not well known to most. Postantibiotic Effect Briefly, this is an observed phenomenon where there is delayed regrowth of bacteria after exposure to an antibiotic, even […]
One has to appreciate the messiness that results from science and research during the initial phase of evidence gathering. Just after the letter in NEJM describing the lack of resurgence of microcephaly cases in Brazil in 2016, the U.S. CDC published data from their Zika Pregnancy Registry, showing in a paper published on 4th April in the […]
The Longitude Prize is 10 million GBP prize fund that will be awarded to the person or team that solves one of the greatest issues of our time. It was developed 300 years after the original British Longitude Prize – a challenge set by the British Government in 1714 to measure the longitude accurately. The […]
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 […]
MIPHIDIC 