I read a recent review in Clinical Infectious Diseases (the second-ranked premier ID journal, depending on ranking criteria) on the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) ranking of antibiotics a couple of days ago. The WHO has ranked antimicrobial agents according to their importance for human medicine since 2007, and has updated the list every 3 years or so. […]
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 […]
I was privileged to be asked to contribute some thoughts on antimicrobial resistance for the December 2015 issue of the Royal College of Physicians (UK) Commentary Magazine. The article – well written by Iain Fossey – is not as interesting as the other feature article on English polymath magician John Dee’s (1527-1608) library that somehow ended […]
This week marks World Antibiotic Awareness Week (16th-22nd November 2015), the third since its inception in 2013. It had its genesis in the European Antibiotic Awareness Day, which originated on 18th November 2008, as well as the U.S. “Get Smart about Antibiotics” week (originally in October 2008). It serves as a way to increase public awareness […]
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet up with Dr Piotr Chlebicki of Singapore General Hospital (SGH), and we discussed antimicrobial stewardship over a beer (or two). Antimicrobial stewardship – a more nuanced and acceptable term than “antimicrobial control” – refers to any number of interventions in a hospital setting that aims to […]
Coincidentally, on the same day I posted my mini-rant about responsibility for antimicrobial resistance, Prof. Michael Edmond, Richard P. Wenzel Professor of Internal Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University also wrote a post about the state of infection prevention programs (no longer “infection control programs”) in the U.S. at his influential blog. It is interesting to […]
Reading through several articles and reports on antimicrobial resistance, I came across a news story about a multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas outbreak linked to duodenoscopes at Huntington Memorial Hospital in the U.S.A. This is not the only outbreak linked to endoscopes this year – the more noteworthy event occurred at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Centre, with 7 ill and 2 […]
As the number of persons with vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) and/or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) colonisation or prior infection increases – both among locals and foreigners – there will be inevitably more of such colonised/infected persons that will have medical indications for high risk procedures such as organ or stem cell transplantation (HSCT). The issue at hand is […]
I went with a small group of colleagues to Dili, Timor-Leste, to teach about appropriate antibiotic prescription for common infectious diseases to doctors from municipal hospitals in Dili, Timor-Leste. This seminar was organised by ReAct – an independent global network for concerted action on antimicrobial resistance based out of Uppsala University in Sweden – and […]
Dr. Kathryn Holt from the University of Melbourne published a very important paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday, using whole genome sequencing to study the population structure as well as virulence and antimicrobial resistance factors of Klebsiella pneumoniae. A total of 288 isolates from 6 countries (Australia, Indonesia, Laos, Singapore, U.S.A. […]
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