I was forwarded an article written by Mary Louisa Toynbee and published in the Guardian a couple of days ago, decrying the failure of the U.K. NHS’ care.data program. This was an ambitious plan to curate anonymised patient electronic medical and social care records into a single database for the purposes of research and improving […]
Spot diagnosis. The patient was otherwise asymptomatic, but was somewhat appalled when the object in the first image passed out per rectum. Questions: What is the diagnosis? How did the patient acquire this? [Updated 2nd July 2016] This is clearly a tapeworm – there are no other human parasites that grow to such length. The […]
There are many criticisms made of our local press, but it is clear that we have good journalists. Ms Kelly Ng from Today has figured out what MOH appeared to have left out from its press release, which is that the Ang Mo Kio MDR-TB cluster ultimately has its roots in the 2012 Parklane cybercafe outbreak. The index […]
News of this outbreak – involving 6 MDR-TB cases to date – was released to the press yesterday evening by the Singapore Ministry of Health. The Channelnewsasia report also includes video footage of our Director of Medical Services as well as Prof Sonny Wang, long-term director of the TB Control Unit. These 6 cases were […]
A middle-aged man was recently diagnosed with poor prognosis myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). He was prescribed a course of subcutaneous azacitidine. One week after the first cycle (7 days) of the drug, he presented with pain over the injection sites (over his anterior abdominal wall), associated with high fever and weight loss. He was admitted to […]
My clinic at Mount Elizabeth Novena Medical Centre is officially closed. Two years did pass by very quickly. It is not without regrets and a sense of pensiveness when I made the choice to move back to the public sector (the university appointment basically remains unchanged). The private sector stint has been great. There has […]
I received the Ministry of Health Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) for tuberculosis a couple of weeks ago. The full version is also available on the MOH website here. Mixed feelings. There is always a bit of pride at having contributed to such things. Having sat in on the meetings, I am also aware of the […]
A late middle-aged man with advanced lung cancer was switched to 3-weekly pembrolizumab after his malignancy progressed through multiple courses of chemotherapy. Pet CT at 12 weeks showed stable disease. However, he presented with sudden onset fever, worsening cough, and breathlessness after 6 months of immunotherapy. There was no contact or travel history of note, […]
The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance was commissioned in July 2014 by the U.K. government to analyse the global problem of antimicrobial resistance and to propose concrete steps to deal with it. A remarkably enlightened move, I may add, given that U.K is not actually one of the countries with high rates of antimicrobial resistance, and […]
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