I was privileged to be invited for the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) annual scientific retreat last Thursday and Friday. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the Thursday sessions, but I was very impressed by the work done there. It is virtually all basic science, but the results of the metagenomics […]
A non-systematic mention of outbreaks that have caught my attention this week. For a more comprehensive search, there is ProMED Mail. One can also skim through the MOH’s weekly infectious diseases bulletin, which is only about local notifiable diseases (where one can quickly see that we have had more dengue and HFMD cases compared to […]
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 […]
The SG50 infectious diseases project “Overcoming Infectious Diseases and Singapore: Past, Present and Future” was officially launched at the end of last year at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) Theatrette. The occasion was graced by the new Minister of State for the Ministries of Communications & Information, and Health, as well as the TTSH CEO, […]
It is the last day of 2015, and therefore timely to reflect back on the significant events of the year. Oftentimes, the true impact of certain events are not known until much later in the future, and media hype (or lack thereof) creates its own bias which is hard to overcome. Here is a personal […]
Just before Christmas, the SGH Diagnostic Bacteriology blogger put up a post on how to isolate Group B streptococcus (GBS) from raw fish samples. SGH Department of Pathology used to have a Food and Water Microbiology Lab, but that was closed several years ago, before the move to the new Academia building. The clinical microbiologists […]
While looking up various historical nuggets of information for our project, I realised that there was a rather similar project done 8 years ago. Titled “The Invisible Enemy: Singapore’s Encounters with Infectious Diseases: Past, Present & Future”, it was an exhibition launched on 24th May 2007 at the National Library. I cannot find any photos […]
There is always time a first time for everything – I made my first ProMED post a couple of days ago. A fellow ID physician in private practice and I recently encountered two persons who were diagnosed with malaria and who had both returned from a camping trip in Brunei. Their infections were not caused by any of […]
After the fall back to baseline of severe Group B streptococcal infections in August, I did not expect to write another post of GBS so soon. But it just goes to show that the management of outbreaks and implementation of policies are both not always straightforward. An excellent recap of the GBS outbreak in Singapore […]
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 […]
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