Infectious diseases, epidemiology, and social networks at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, NUS
Today’s World Antibiotic Awareness Week blog post comes from Richard Smith, Professor of Health System Economics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. His research focuses on how a country’s health system interacts with other parts of the economy. In this post, he talks about the wide-ranging costs of antimicrobial resistance to individuals…
Hsu Li Yang is Associate Professor at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, where he leads the Antimicrobial Resistance Programme. In the first of a series of blog posts for World Antibiotic Awareness Week, he talks about the progress and challenges of controlling MRSA in Singaporean hospitals. I was…
The WHO’s Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance, has specific recommendations to educate the public about antimicrobial resistance and to introduce this issue into the educational curriculum. As part of the second World Antibiotic Awareness Week (November 14-18, 2016), we organized a two-day event at Jurong Regional Library over the weekend to teach children about…
In anticipation of World Antibiotic Awareness Week (November 14-18), we will be running a series of activities at Jurong Regional Library to teach children about bacteria, antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. Come join us at the library on Saturday Nov 12th and Sunday Nov 13th between 10am and 4pm!
This is a pre-submission version of our recent letter to the Lancet. The final published version can be accessed here. Following widespread criticism about inadequate action during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa(1), the global response is once again being tested by two re-emerging infectious disease threats in the form of Zika and yellow fever…
Last week saw the publication of an open letter to Dr Margaret Chan, Director General of WHO, calling for the postponement of the Olympic Games, due to take place in Rio de Janeiro in August. To date, the letter has been signed by 209 academics and public health professionals. The signatories base their position on…
Following the publication of CDC’s paper evaluating the evidence for a causal link between Zika virus and microcephaly this week, twitter was alight with pronouncements that this link has been definitively established, at least based on the CDC authors’ interpretation of Shepard’s criteria for teratogenicity and Bradford Hill’s causal considerations. That a causal link has…
I’ve always found it rather ironic that those of us trained to collect, analyze and interpret data are often the worst qualified to communicate it. This is evident from the results sections of millions of scientific papers out there, littered with visually unappealing, cluttered, incomprehensible and, at worst, highly deceiving graphs. The purpose of a…
We’ve been tracking WHO’s prominence on twitter as a source of information on Zika virus and microcephaly. After a couple of weeks of relatively lower prominence, WHO was back at the centre last week, this time being the major source of retweets to dispel rumours that have been making the rounds regarding the possibility of…
This post comes from Dr Neisha Sundaram. Neisha is a cultural epidemiologist and Research Fellow at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health. Her research focuses on use of mixed methods to study vaccine acceptance. This Flavivirus is a current infectious disease and media favourite, with a lot being said about Zika in the…