A late middle-aged man presented with high fever for a day. He had been hospitalized for acute gastroenteritis a week ago, receiving intravenous fluids and oral fluoroquinolones. Clinical examination was unremarkable except for erythema around the previous IV plug site – there were no cardiac murmurs and lung auscultation revealed normal breath sounds. He was […]
I had seen an early prototype of the Microreact website while I was in the UK in 2010 – it is now live here. It is the work of David Aanensen and his team at Imperial College, UK, and was funded by the Wellcome Trust. Simply load up a spreadsheet (with latitude and longitude coordinates) and […]
To complete the MRSA discussion, it is necessary to mention the final group of MRSA – livestock-associated MRSA (LA-MRSA). Just as healthcare-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) and community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) are (at least initially) distinct from each other via differences in their genetic make-up, LA-MRSA represents yet another separate path of evolution for MRSA, with its own […]
The Singapore General Hospital Diagnostic Bacteriology Section blogger has just posted a succinct and comprehensive overview of community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) clones in Singapore. It seems like ancient history now, but CA-MRSA really rose into the global consciousness only in the early 21st century, when scientists from Europe (particularly the researchers from INSERM E0230, Lyon France – the […]
Several preceding posts (here, here and here) had described the change in healthcare-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) clones in the local setting, and either the SGH Diagnostic Bacteriology blog or I (or both) will probably write on community-associated MRSA clones in Singapore in the near future. But from a practical point of view, does it really matter […]
The Singapore General Hospital (SGH) Diagnostic Bacteriology section’s official blog had recently described the change in healthcare-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) clones in our local hospitals, with a shift from a near-complete monopoly by ST239-MRSA-III to a duopoly between the older clone and ST22-MRSA-IV (or UK-EMRSA-15) within a period of 10 years from 2001 to 2010. I like […]
A major highlight of working on the Singapore MRSA evolution and competition study was obtaining the very old MRSA isolates from the 1980’s and 1990’s. One of the biggest issues in the Singapore clinical microbiology scene – to me – is the loss of historical isolates (and the lack of any attempts to correct this to […]
Two days ago, our paper on the “Evolution dynamics of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in a healthcare system” was published in the BiomedCentral journal Genome Biology. We sequenced the genomes of 260 clinical MRSA isolates cultured over 3 decades (1982 to 2010) in four Singaporean hospitals – a number that seemed really high back in 2011, but […]
A timeline movie of different MRSA clones discovered in Singapore. The movie unfortunately plays rather slowly (just over a minute). More detailed descriptions will be provided in subsequent blog posts.
I came across this site via a search on “superbugs” on Google News. The UK review team was commissioned by the UK Prime Minister in July 2014, and published its first report about 2 weeks ago. By the end of 2 years – summer 2016 – the Review will have to propose a package of […]
MIPHIDIC 