We are organizing an essay and a video contest for students of Singapore schools (including polytechnics but excluding universities). The essay contest is open to students between 13 and 20 years of age. No entry fee is required, and any essay format (i.e. fiction, scientific communication, poetry, etc) is welcome. The essays should be submitted […]
This issue came up as part of a discussion on improving antibiotic prescription – the discussion triggered (strangely enough) by the lack of mention in this week’s Straits Times article on inappropriate antibiotic prescription. It is an interesting topic for discussion and understanding, but I would like to stress that the issues go far beyond […]
I was involved (extremely) peripherally in some work on chromosomal resistance islands in Acinetobacter baumannii by Prof Ruth Hall’s team at the University of Sydney, and part of that work has just been published. Basically, the team was investigating a 16S ribosomal RNA methyltransferase gene armA that conveys resistance to a broad array of aminoglycosides (including gentamicin […]
Like most other infectious disease physicians and microbiologists, I have been following the evolving global Mycobacterium chimaera outbreak with interest. I knew nothing about M. chimaera (or that it even existed) until last year. It is an interesting organism – a slow-growing non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM – a “catchall classification” that includes all mycobacteria other than those belonging to the Mycobacterium […]
One of our little hobby projects – alluded to in my previous post on drug-resistant bugs in pork and beef – has finally been published in a local academic journal. There is quite a lot of published data on the presence of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Enterobacteriaceae in food animals, particularly chicken. What about in Singapore? We […]
Visited Phnom Penh for the first time last week as part of a delegation from the School of Public Health (the School has a Tuberculosis Control in Cambodia Programme that it implements in partnership with the University of Health Sciences in Cambodia as well as the famous London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). It […]
The SGH Department of Microbiology blogger has just uploaded a paper to biorXiv describing our little hobby project with staff and students from Ngee Ann Polytechnic. Out of 10 beef (Australia, NZ and Brazil) and 20 pork (Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia) samples from various local supermarkets, one MRSA (from a hunk of pork shoulder ostensibly […]
I had the pleasure of reading about Singapore’s decision to develop a national action plan against antimicrobial resistance on the front page of the Straits Times yesterday. It is rare that antimicrobial resistance gets featured so prominently, so kudos to the Straits Times and reporters like Carolyn Khew who are willing to write about these […]
I had previously mentioned that private sector specialists in Singapore are independent operators – the majority actually run their own clinics/practice as individuals. Most professional partnerships between doctors have been small in scale (i.e. 2 or 3 individual doctors), and a good number of such partnerships have come apart because of personal differences or the […]
Some musings at the end of the year, after 6 months back in the public sector following a short 2-year stint in the private sector as an infectious diseases physician. This series will probably be (infrequently) updated and extended over time. My experience is primarily with acute hospital-based care, largely through the lens of the […]
MIPHIDIC 