I attended the launch of Dr Shashi Jayakumar and Mr Olimpiu Urcan’s marvelous book – Singapore Chess: A History, 1945-1990 – two evenings ago at the National Library. The book is both a historical treatise – including interviews with many former top Singaporean chess players as well as archived data from multiple sources – as […]
The second edition of the Commonwealth Science Conference is held in Singapore from 13-16 June, jointly organized by UK’s Royal Society and Singapore’s National Research Foundation. It is attended by over 400 scientists from over 40 states within the Commonwealth, with the majority of the presentations held at the Matrix in Biopolis. There are four […]
The chess olympiads are finally over, with the very strong men’s USA team powering to its first ever Olympiad gold since 1976 (which the Soviets boycotted). They were seeded second behind the Russian team, but had fielded a team comprising three of the top 10 players in the world (Caruana, Nakamura and So) – the […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Singapore Chess Federation (SCF) held an extraordinary general meeting (EOGM) two nights ago at the Bishan Community Club. The event even made it into the mainstream newspaper. As can be seen from today’s news, the incumbents survived the leadership challenge, although the picture painted from the news report did not accurately reflect events on the […]
We move on from outpatient management of febrile neutropenia – which is backed by good science and is conceptually attractive but not straightforward to implement – to inpatient management of “high risk” (by MASCC or other criteria) febrile neutropenia, specifically in the area of antibiotic therapy. Here, there are a bewildering number of options (basically, […]
After the rates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections fell in patients with febrile neutropenia, it became tacit knowledge to many oncologists (and haematologists) that the majority of patients with febrile neutropenia – especially those with solid organ cancers – recovered uneventfully. How could this knowledge be codified into a predictive model that could reliably separate out patients at […]
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 […]
MIPHIDIC 