In the first large foodbourne outbreak of the year (to my knowledge anyway), seventy-six cases of food poisoning so far have been linked to the consumption of durian pastries from Goodwood Park Hotel according to various mainstream news reports today, resulting in the suspension of the hotel bakery’s food establishment license by the National Environment […]
Part of the pleasure of attending any large medical conference is viewing the trade exhibition. In ECCMID this year, the pharmaceutical industry is out in force but are outnumbered by the diagnostics companies. The trend continues towards point-of-care and easy to use diagnostics platforms. Next generation sequencing has not made it to prime time yet. […]
The annual European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases is going on now at the Amsterdam RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, and will end on 12th April. This meeting has grown from strength to strength, and now has more than 11,000 attendees each year. Attending the session on individualised management of invasive […]
Finally attempting to complete this series after a long hiatus. Fungal infections are common in patients with prolonged neutropenia (and therefore predominantly in patients with malignant haematological conditions or after allogeneic stem cell transplantation), and were present in a significant propotion of patients with acute leukaemia in various historical autopsy series. These infections are conventionally divided into yeast […]
A 3-year-old boy presented with mild left foot pain 6 weeks ago, which resulted in limping 3 weeks ago, followed by swelling over the dorsum of the foot less than a week ago. He was previously healthy except for perianal abscess which developed 1 week after birth.He had met (and exceeded several of) his development […]
A young local woman who was previously well went on a 9-day missionary trip to Pakistan, traveling between Karachi and Lahore as well as several villages in between. She had an episode of fever with chills midway through the trip, associated with diarrhoea two days later. Although the diarrhoea improved over the next two days, […]
I had the honour of being invited for the above event in Hong Kong (organised by the University of Hong Kong), held on 13th of March, with a small accompanying seminar on the next morning. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 catalysed a lot of frustration with the global health system (which basically […]
For the past few days, I and many others have been riveted by the match between Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo and Lee Sedol – one of the top 5 Go players in the world (he is variously listed as world champion as well as current world no.2, but it’s not as easy to figure out the […]
Another young man from South Asia, who had been working in the construction industry in Singapore for a few years, was incidentally found to have a painless mass over the left upper quadrant of his abdomen during a routine medical examination. He mentioned that it had appeared over the past week, gradually increasing in size. He was […]
MIPHIDIC 