February 2019

The government recently passed the bill for standardised packaging for all tobacco products sold in Singapore. From next year, all tobacco packs will be a drab brown colour, with all logos, colours and branding elements removed, and graphic health warnings covering 70 per cent of the pack surface. Packaging is an important marketing tool, especially in places like Singapore where tobacco advertising is heavily restricted. A tobacco industry executive, in internal industry communications, stated in 1994: “When you don’t have anything else – our packaging is our marketing.” The move toRead more

In response to the recent HIV registry data leak, Associate Professor Hsu Li Yang, Programme Leader (Infectious Diseases), and Mr Rayner Tan, PhD student and researcher on HIV, address the dated views that many Singaporeans have of the disease. While there has been significant advances in medical science and treatment of HIV, the same cannot be said about the progress towards social acceptance and de-stigmatisation of the disease. Public perceptions and attitudes towards people living with HIV have not move beyond the narratives of fear and prejudice that marked the early

Cutting down on white rice may not in itself lower one’s risk of getting diabetes. What matters more is what the rice is substituted with and the overall quality of a person’s diet. These were presented in two new studies that used data from the Singapore Chinese Health Study (SCHS) and were co-authored by Professor Rob van Dam, Vice Dean (Academic Affairs) and Epidemiology Domain Leader, and Professor Koh Woon Puay, SCHS Principal Investigator and director of the Centre for Clinician-Scientist Development at Duke-NUS Medical School. One study measured the link between