Doraemon? Good grief...

From The Guardian website:

Depressing sexist news out of Malaysia.

The Malaysian government has urged women to dress up at home and avoid nagging their husbands in coronavirus lockdown advice.

Reuters reports:

In a series of online posters with the hashtag #WomenPreventCOVID19, Malaysia’s women’s affairs ministry issued advice on how to avoid domestic conflicts during the partial lockdown, which began on March 18.

One of the campaign posters depicted a man sitting on a sofa, and asked women to refrain from being “sarcastic” if they need help with household chores.

Avoid nagging your husband, another poster said, attempting to inject humour by using a voice similar to the anime character Doraemon - a blue robot cat popular across Asia.

The ministry also urged women to dress up and wear their makeup while working from home.

“(It) is extremely condescending both to women and men,” said Nisha Sabanayagam, a manager at All Women’s Action Society, a Malaysian advocacy group.

“These posters promote the concept of gender inequality and perpetuate the concept of patriarchy,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

The posters, uploaded on Facebook and Instragram, drew widespread ridicule online with social media users urging the government to remove them.

“How did we go from preventing baby dumping, fighting domestic violence to some sad variant of the Obedient Wives Club?” Twitter user @yinshaoloong wrote.

“No tips on how to deal with domestic violence?” asked another user @honeyean.

The ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Women’s groups have warned lockdowns could see a rise in domestic violence, with women trapped with their abusers. Some governments have stepped up response, including in France which offers hotel rooms to victims.

Malaysia is ranked 104 out of 153 countries in the latest World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index, after scoring poorly on political empowerment and economic participation.

Forgotten victims

I saw this joke being circulated through social media. It comes from The Telegraph, one of the national dailies in the United Kingdom. Thought it hilarious enough to reproduce here:

Spare a thought for the forgotten victims of this crisis... burglars

Michael Deacon
Parliamentary Speechwriter
The Telegraph
28 March 2020, 7:00pm 

The crisis has brought disruption to every section of  society. From schoolchildren to the elderly, and from the self-employed to the abruptly furloughed, all of us are facing upheaval in our daily lives and anxiety about our futures.

Amid the clamour of appeal for Government support, however, the plight of one group appears to have been cruelly overlooked: Criminals.

The Prime Minister may only have announced the nationwide lockdown on Monday night, but already families from across the law-breaking community are feeling the pinch. Burglars, for example, have seen their takings collapse.

“It’s a nightmare,” says Barry Knuckles, president of the National Union of Housebreakers. “Now that the entire population is at home 24 hours a day, it’s impossible to burgle anyone. They’re never out.”

Speaking on the Today programme, Mr Knuckles urged the Government to provide financial support for his members during these tough times. He called on the Chancellor to cover 80 per cent of the value of all the laptops, jewellery and flatscreen TVs that Britain’s burglars would normally have stolen and sold on. So far, however, he has yet to receive a response.

“The political class are completely out of touch with the concerns of decent, hard-working criminals,” he says.

But burglars aren’t the only felons struggling to meet the challenges of the coronavirus age.

“It’s all very well for people who can work from home, like phishing scammers and identity thieves,” says Dave Fingers, chairman of the Association of British Muggers and Bag-Snatchers. “But how are you supposed to pick someone’s pocket from two metres away? Some of our lads have tried using those little hooked rods you get in fairground hook-a-duck games, or those funny reacher-grabber tools that old folk use for picking up stuff they’ve dropped on the floor. But it’s hopeless. The Government’s got to think again.”

The spread of the virus has also caused widespread concern among the Jihadi terrorist community. According to recent newspaper reports, Isil has ordered its members to stay away from Europe for fear of catching the disease.

“We’re disgusted by the number of Western infidels refusing to observe official guidance on social distancing,” says an Isil spokesman. “These people are making the streets completely unsafe. Their actions could cost thousands of innocent lives.

“As an employer, our number one concern is the welfare of our employees. The last thing we want is for one of our suicide bombers to get killed.”

Three signs to Stay@Home

I've been informed that on 16 Jan 2020, this message had been circulating among certain sectors of the community. It involved a warning from some local Tao masters:

Dear Tao Devotees,

Spiritual Tao Masters have predicted that 2020 is going to be a difficult year. A financial bleak year. So one has to spend wisely and avoid spending unnecessarily. Be very careful and cautious when conducting business with others lest you get cheated. There'll be political conflicts and turmoils. There'll be more natural disasters than usual. Hence its advisable  for one to travel less unless its necessary to.

The Masters have already advised the above on a number of occasions 🙏🙏🙏

A random illustration only. This Bazi chart does not refer to anyone I know.

Last night, I was listening to an online metaphysics talk and was also warned that in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we should be extra careful during this coming week. Especially, if you have the Snake, Horse and/or Monkey animal signs or Yin Water in your Bazi chart, you should avoid leaving the house. Stay@Home

Curiously enough, when I awoke this morning to check my social media, I found a friend had sent me this message:

Advice from Jade Emperor, known as Geok Ong Tai Tay or Tnie Kong, through the Spirit of the North, known as Seong Tay Kong or Pak Tao Seng Kuan, to the devotees to self-impose curfew on 4th & 5th April 2020 (12th & 13th day of the 3rd lunar month). 

This important message is for all good intent and purpose only. If you are a Taoist and believer, this message is for the benefit of its followers and others in this critical Covid-19 period. For other faiths, please read with an open mind.

"Stay home at all times on 4th & 5th April, 2020 (Saturday & Sunday) and do not come out whenever possible as the Covid-19 virus spread is very strong during these two days."

Three sources, but the people connected with them do not know one another. However, they were conveying more the less the same warning. Was it a coincidence? I don't know. But I'm not taking any chances. I have the Horse animal sign in my chart, after all.

Some coronavirus questions

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/25/how-long-coronavirus-lasts-on-surfaces-packages-groceries 

How long does coronavirus survive on different surfaces?
Danielle Renwick, The Guardian
Wed 25 Mar 2020 14.54 GMT

Covid-19 RNA was found on a cruise ship 17 days after passengers left. What are the risks of handling packages and groceries?
More people are staying indoors to avoid contact with people potentially infected by Covid-19. But in light of a recent report from the US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that said RNA from the virus that causes Covid-19 was found in the Princess Cruise ship 17 days after its passengers had left, what are the risks of handling packages, groceries and what scientists call “high-touch” surfaces?

Does the cruise ship report imply that viruses survive up to 17 days on surfaces?
Dr Julia Marcus: A CDC investigation of the cruise ship found evidence of viral RNA in cabins that hadn’t yet been cleaned. But to be clear, that just means the virus was detectable – not that it was viable or that contact with those services would have been able to infect someone. (Editor’s note: RNA, or ribonucleic acid, carries the virus’s genetic information.)
Dr Akiko Iwasaki: It just means that there are parts of the virus that still remain. The virus needs many other components to be intact. If you have bits and pieces of RNA, that’s not going to make a virus, you need an entire intact genome. Just because you had a little piece of RNA doesn’t mean that there’s an infection.

How long can the virus survive on surfaces?
Marcus: The New England Journal of Medicine just published a study that tested how long the virus can remain stable on different kinds of surfaces within a controlled laboratory setting. They found that it was still detectable on copper for up to four hours, on cardboard for up to 24 hours, and on plastic and steel for up to 72 hours. But it’s important to note that the amount of virus decreased rapidly over time on each of those surfaces. And so the risk of infection from touching them would probably decrease over time as well.

Could you become infected from just a single particle of Covid-19?
Iwasaki: There’s a certain amount of viral particle that you need to be exposed to become infected. If you just had one viral particle on your finger, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be infected. Some viruses are very potent, you only need like 10 particles to get infected, while others you [may] need millions. The fewer viral particles you’re exposed to, the less likely you’re going to get infected. That’s why the amount of virus on a surface is important.

How many people are being contaminated via surfaces as opposed to airborne particles or direct contact with an infected person?
Marcus: As far as we know right now, people are much more likely to be infected by close contact with an infected person than by touching a contaminated surface. That said, it’s still important to be conscious of what we’re touching, especially high-touch surfaces, and be careful about cleaning our hands after touching things. For example, public transit or grocery stores and places where there tend to be a lot of people.
Iwasaki: The virus is pretty stable on [materials] like plastic and steel – they can persist for a few days. So it’s very possible that someone who’s sick will deposit the virus on to the surface and then somebody else will touch it and touch their face.

Is there a risk of being infected by groceries and packages that we have delivered?
Marcus: It’s a low risk, but it’s possible that if someone is delivering a package to your house and they are sick, that may be a route for transmission. I would recommend that any time something new comes into your household, be conscious of washing your hands after handling it.
Iwasaki: The [virus’s] stability is pretty good on the cardboard. Once you get those packages, open them, quickly throw away the cardboard, wash your hands, and try to avoid touching your face. Take any measures that you can to minimize contact from the surface of the package to your face.

Is it possible the contents of a package could have been contaminated by whoever packed it?
Iwasaki: There’s definitely a possibility of contamination, but it’s much more likely that the outer cardboard itself will come into contact with a lot more people than what’s inside. And if it takes days to get to your home, whatever virus that was inside will be deactivated already.

Do you have any tips for cleaning surfaces?
Marcus: It’s good to routinely clean any high-touch surfaces, like door handles and toilets. Regular household cleaners are effective, including bleach solutions and alcohol solutions of at least 70% alcohol. If somebody in your household has been diagnosed with Covid-19, then cleaning and disinfection becomes much more important and should be done more frequently.
Iwasaki: The [Food and Drug Administration] has a list of home cleaning products that are known to kill Covid-19. This virus is an enveloped virus so it doesn’t survive well in soap and alcohol.

Experts:
Dr Akiko Iwasaki, professor of immunology at Yale University
Dr Julia Marcus, infectious disease epidemiologist and professor in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School

The N95 mask

An excerpt from a long but fascinating story in the Fast Company website with the title The untold origin story of the N95 mask

THE FIRST MODERN RESPIRATOR IS BORN FROM PLAGUE—AND RACISM

Healthcare workers in “anti-plague masks” during the 1911 Manchurian plague.
[Photo: courtesy University of Cambridge/Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities
and Social Sciences (CRASSH, The University of Cambridge)/The University of Hong
Kong Libraries]

In the fall of 1910, a plague broke out across Manchuria—what we know now as Northern China—which was broken up in politically complex jurisdictions shared between China and Russia.

“It’s apocalyptic. Unbelievable. It kills 100% of those infected, no one survives. And it kills them within 24 to 48 hours of the first symptoms,” says Lynteris. “No one has come across something like this in modern times, and it is similar to the descriptions of Black Death.”

What followed was a scientific arms race, to deduce what was causing the plague and stop it. “Both Russia and China want to prove themselves worthy and scientific enough, because that would lead to a claim of sovereignty,” says Lynteris. “Whomever is scientific enough should be given control of this rich and important area.”

The Chinese Imperial Court brought in a doctor named Lien-teh Wu to head its efforts. He was born in Penang and studied medicine at Cambridge. Wu was young, and he spoke lousy Mandarin. In a plague that quickly attracted international attention and doctors from around the world, he was “completely unimportant,” according to Lynteris. But after conducting an autopsy on one of the victims, Wu determined that the plague was not spread by fleas, as many suspected, but through the air.

Expanding upon the surgery masks he’d seen in the West, Wu developed a heartier mask from gauze and cotton, which wrapped securely around one’s face and added several layers of cloth to filter inhalations. His invention was a breakthrough, but some doctors still doubted its efficacy.

“There’s a famous incident. He’s confronted by a famous old hand in the region, a French doctor [Gérald Mesny] . . . and Wu explains to the French doctor his theory that plague is pneumonic and airborne,” Lynteris says. “And the French guy humiliates him . . . and in very racist terms says, ‘What can we expect from a Chinaman?’ And to prove this point, [Mesny] goes and attends the sick in a plague hospital without wearing Wu’s mask, and he dies in two days with plague.”

Other doctors in the region quickly developed their own masks. “Some are . . . completely strange things,” Lynteris says. “Hoods with glasses, like diving masks.”

A streetcar conductor and passenger in Seattle wearing masks during the 1918 pandemic.
[Photo: Wiki Commons]

But Wu’s mask won out because in empirical testing, it protected users from bacteria. According to Lynteris, it was also a great design. It could be constructed by hand out of materials that were cheap and in ready supply. Between January and February of 1911, mask production ramped up to unknown numbers. Medical staff wore them, soldiers wore them, and some everyday people wore them, too. Not only did that help thwart the spread of the plague; the masks became a symbol of modern medical science looking an epidemic right in the eye.

Wu’s mask quickly became an icon through international newspaper reports. “The mask was a very novel thing . . . it had an effect of strangeness, which the press loved, but you imagine a black-and-white photograph with a white mask—it reads well,” says Lynteris. “It’s a marketing success.”

When the Spanish flu arrived in 1918, Wu’s mask was well-known among scientists and even much of the public. Companies around the globe increased production of similar masks to help abate the spread of flu.

The story continued by saying that the N95 was made for the industries but it had arrived just in time for use in the hospitals too. "The N95 mask is a descendant of Wu’s design," the writer Mark Wilson noted. "Through World War I and World War II, scientists invented air-filtering gas masks that wrapped around your entire head to clean the air supply. Similar masks, loaded with fiberglass filters, began to be used in the mining industry to prevent black lung."

To read the whole story, please click here.

Sand storm

The current order to control the movement of people around the country as the government attempts to break the spread of the coronavirus means that I have the time to catch up a bit on my stories. Here's one. It was meant to be written at the end of last month. My friend, Siang Jin, was in town and on a Friday morning, the 21st of February, we had assembled at the school to discuss our preparations for the student leadership workshop for the fourth and fifth formers.

We finished early and decided to go to the Ocean Green Restaurant in town for lunch. I hadn't been there for quite a while. The food was good, as always. But this was not what i want to talk about. After we had parted company at the end of the meal, I walked to the beach front to take in the sights and trying out some features on my camera. Funny, I've had this Olympus E-PL7 for several years already but I've very seldom played around with these features.

So there I was, moving about the beach, snapping merrily away on my camera and taking a good look at the faraway Gurney Drive when I was puzzled to see some haziness covering up the view along the coast line. I only took one or two snapshots before my attention was diverted elsewhere, but imagine my surprise when I learnt later that Gurney Drive had been affected by a very rare sand storm. The Malay Mail newspaper had reported the phenomenon here.

In times of crisis

Job done, finally!

I had meant to write this appreciation note about two weeks back but the coronavirus situation in the country simply overwhelmed everything else. Now that everyone is forced to stay in since the 18th of this month, I thought it an appropriate time to say that on 5 Mar 2020, I noticed a group of four men - workers employed by the contracted third-party company, no doubt, since they were not wearing the orange MBSP t-shirts - sweeping Lorong Jernih 4 and clearing the drains of clogged dirt and leaves, especially at a time when the tacoma trees were in full bloom.

So, thank you to the Province Wellesley City Council (Majlis Bandaraya Seberang Perai) for getting this job done....finally! And thank you too to the City Councillor, Michael Tan, for initiating this clean-up after listening to my complaint. But I do hope the contracted company will come back regularly to fulfil their end of the contract without me, or the other residents here, having to complain about them again.

How coronavirus affects the lungs

From The Guardian website today:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/21/coronavirus-what-happens-to-lungs-covid-19

Coronavirus: what happens to people's lungs when they get Covid-19?
Respiratory physician John Wilson explains the range of Covid-19 impacts, from no symptoms to severe illness featuring pneumonia
By Graham Readfearn
Sat 21 Mar 2020 12.09 GMT
Last modified on Sat 21 Mar 2020 14.25 GMT

What became known as Covid-19, or the coronavirus, started in late 2019 as a cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause. The cause of the pneumonia was found to be a new virus – severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or Sars-CoV-2. The illness caused by the virus is Covid-19.

Now declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the majority of people who contract Covid-19 suffer only mild, cold-like symptoms.

WHO says about 80% of people with Covid-19 recover without needing any specialist treatment. Only about one person in six becomes seriously ill “and develops difficulty breathing”.

So how can Covid-19 develop into a more serious illness featuring pneumonia, and what does that do to our lungs and the rest of our body?

How is the virus affecting people?
Guardian Australia spoke with Prof John Wilson, president-elect of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and a respiratory physician.

He says almost all serious consequences of Covid-19 feature pneumonia.

Wilson says people who catch Covid-19 can be placed into four broad categories.

The least serious are those people who are “sub-clinical” and who have the virus but have no symptoms.

Next are those who get an infection in the upper respiratory tract, which, Wilson says, “means a person has a fever and a cough and maybe milder symptoms like headache or conjunctivitis”.

He says: “Those people with minor symptoms are still able to transmit the virus but may not be aware of it.”

The largest group of those who would be positive for Covid-19, and the people most likely to present to hospitals and surgeries, are those who develop the same flu-like symptoms that would usually keep them off work.

A fourth group, Wilson says, will develop severe illness that features pneumonia.

He says: “In Wuhan, it worked out that from those who had tested positive and had sought medical help, roughly 6% had a severe illness.”

The WHO says the elderly and people with underlying problems like high blood pressure, heart and lung problems or diabetes, are more likely to develop serious illness.

How does the pneumonia develop?
When people with Covid-19 develop a cough and fever, Wilson says this is a result of the infection reaching the respiratory tree – the air passages that conduct air between the lungs and the outside.

He says: “The lining of the respiratory tree becomes injured, causing inflammation. This in turn irritates the nerves in the lining of the airway. Just a speck of dust can stimulate a cough.

“But if this gets worse, it goes past just the lining of the airway and goes to the gas exchange units, which are at the end of the air passages.

“If they become infected they respond by pouring out inflammatory material into the air sacs that are at the bottom of our lungs.”

If the air sacs then become inflamed, Wilson says this causes an “outpouring of inflammatory material [fluid and inflammatory cells] into the lungs and we end up with pneumonia.”

He says lungs that become filled with inflammatory material are unable to get enough oxygen to the bloodstream, reducing the body’s ability to take on oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide.

“That’s the usual cause of death with severe pneumonia,” he says.

How can the pneumonia be treated?
Prof Christine Jenkins, chair of Lung Foundation Australia and a leading respiratory physician, told Guardian Australia: “Unfortunately, so far we don’t have anything that can stop people getting Covid-19 pneumonia.

“People are already trialling all sorts of medications and we’re hopeful that we might discover that there are various combinations of viral and anti-viral medications that could be effective. At the moment there isn’t any established treatment apart from supportive treatment, which is what we give people in intensive care.

“We ventilate them and maintain high oxygen levels until their lungs are able to function in a normal way again as they recover.”

Wilson says patients with viral pneumonia are also at risk of developing secondary infections, so they would also be treated with anti-viral medication and antibiotics.

“In some situations that isn’t enough,” he says of the current outbreak. “The pneumonia went unabated and the patients did not survive.”

Is Covid-19 pneumonia different?
Jenkins says Covid-19 pneumonia is different from the most common cases that people are admitted to hospitals for.

“Most types of pneumonia that we know of and that we admit people to hospital for are bacterial and they respond to an antibiotic.

Wilson says there is evidence that pneumonia caused by Covid-19 may be particularly severe. Wilson says cases of coronavirus pneumonia tend to affect all of the lungs, instead of just small parts.

He says: “Once we have an infection in the lung and, if it involves the air sacs, then the body’s response is first to try and destroy [the virus] and limit its replication.”

But Wilson says this “first responder mechanism” can be impaired in some groups, including people with underlying heart and lung conditions, diabetes and the elderly.

Jenkins says that, generally, people aged 65 and over are at risk of getting pneumonia, as well as people with medical conditions such as diabetes, cancer or a chronic disease affecting the lungs, heart, kidney or liver, smokers, Indigenous Australians, and infants aged 12 months and under.

“Age is the major predictor of risk of death from pneumonia. Pneumonia is always serious for an older person and in fact it used to be one of the main causes of death in the elderly. Now we have very good treatments for pneumonia.

“It’s important to remember that no matter how healthy and active you are, your risk for getting pneumonia increases with age. This is because our immune system naturally weakens with age, making it harder for our bodies to fight off infections and diseases.”

A Covid-19 advice

This message has been circulating around through Whatsapp lately and I've even been asked whether or not the writer is an Old Free. It was reportedly written by a Dr Yong Boon Hun, a Malaysian working in the Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital. However, I've received confirmation from an Old Free friend, Class of 1975, that the message is indeed real and Yong himself had posted it in their whatsapp chat group. So, yes, it is real. Yong was his classmate at Penang Free School. So here is his message.

Dear all, I wrote the message below to my extended family in Malaysia, and I am sharing my thoughts with you, my PFS family. Sorry if I sound a bit alarmist.

China is now past the peak and you see doctors going home from Wuhan, and in HK things are getting more relaxed but still on guard for a second wave from imported cases especially hundreds or thousands of returning students and HK people from China when allowed.

"Dear family, I have been reading about the COVID 19 situation in Asia, Australia and Europe. The most alarming is the sudden change in policy in the UK, based on epidemiology modeling. At least their PM listens and acts on advice of scientists. If reports are true, they are looking at very large numbers of people getting infected and are now going to lockdown.

"But for MALAYSIA, you are now going through what China and HK did in January and February. Based on what I see the government is doing, I do not think Malaysia will go through the pandemic like China and HK or Singapore. It will be more like Italy and UK.

"What I mean is after preparing with supplies, limit your social movements now. Don’t follow the crowd by not realizing the seriousness of the situation. Mingle only with people you know who have not followed crowds.

"If the government cannot take care of the people, you have to take care of yourselves. You have to change your mindset now. No more business as usual. Prepare for war (against the virus). Oil price and share markets are collapsing but that is not even the most important thing. The most important thing now is sit and DO NOTHING.

Prepare to spend most of your time at home or if outdoors then far from any crowds and don’t touch anything.

"In HK now , anyone coming back from any country has to self quarantine for two weeks. My colleague’s son who is a student in UK will have to stay by himself in a spare flat for two weeks. Food will be left at his door. In my hospital if anyone at home comes back from overseas then I am counted as a contact and I cannot go to work for two weeks. This is the extent of the serious measures that have to be adopted. If the Malaysian government does not adopt these measures or if the population does not want to follow, then you must adopt the strict measures yourself to keep from falling sick.

"You probably should not be eating out now if you can. And sanitize your hands after you touch anything outside. Do what may seem like a bit of overkill or being obsessive, but you should be adopting a more careful attitude now than the rest of the population, not following their standard.

"Malaysian public has no idea what they are about to face. If you read this you must prepare yourself.

"HK has 44 public hospitals and maybe 15 of them can take COVID patients. We have 7 million people and Malaysia has 4.5 times that. HK and China have been preparing for 17 years for another epidemic. HK’s budget for public healthcare was HKD 60 billion per year and another 30 billion was allocated this month to fight the virus. I don’t know the resources that the Malaysian government has allocated."

Cheng Beng advisories

It looks very likely that most Chinese cemeteries and memorial parks around the country are prohibiting people from going there to carry out their Cheng Beng activities this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. While these cemeteries and memorial parks are still accepting cremations and burials, the general public cannot go in even to spruce up the graves. I understand that in Penang, the United Hokkien Cemeteries will be making a similar announcement soon. [LATEST 20 Mar 2020: They have. See the third and fourth images below.] This news story below is from The Malay Mail.

No-go for Qing Ming as public advised to skip tomb-sweeping tradition amid Covid-19 shutdown
Thursday, 19 Mar 2020 05:02 PM MYT
BY MARK RYAN RAJ

PETALING JAYA, March 19 ― Kwong Tong Cemetery Management Kuala Lumpur deputy chairman Lee Chun Kong has suggested that Malaysians should skip the traditional Chinese festival amid the Covid-19 shutdown nationwide.

Lee told Malay Mail that it is safer to “stop all” traditional activities related to the festival to avoid spreading the virus. “What we advise is to stop all Qing Ming practices such as tomb-sweeping. We do not encourage anyone to come during this time.”

Lee explained that this was his first time experiencing something like this. “In all the 30 years that I have been working, this has never happened before,” said Lee.

“There has never been a virus or disease outbreak like this. So no one really knows how to handle the situation, which is why we should support the government and follow its rules to stop the spread.” However, Lee said despite the Movement Control Order issued by the government, some people may still end up visiting cemeteries next week.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen something like this happen during Qing Ming. So it’s also everyone else’s first too I assume. They might be scared to skip it but we don’t advise them to go out. If they still come, what can we do? All we can say is please protect yourself and don’t stay for too long.”

He also recommended that it would be better to leave the elderly and the young at home if you do still plan on visiting the cemetery.

Nirvana Memorial Park general manager Melvyn Laang said the company will prohibit all Qing Ming or cultural related activities, except those related to burials or cremations. “Basically we are closed. We want to adhere to the government’s instructions, so we think that people should just come after all this blows over.”

LATEST 21 Mar 2020: United Hokkien Cemeteries is the latest 

establishment to ban people from performing Cheng Beng during 

the period of restricted movement. 

He expressed that he felt the Chinese community in Malaysia should be smart about keeping themselves safe during this time and observe the customary rituals during other festivals later in the year. “Everyone should just stay at home. There are many other festivals on the Chinese calendar, so you can just come next time.”

Other funeral and memorial service companies such as Xiao En have also declared their locations to be closed for Qing Ming.

Qing Ming, also known as All Souls Day or Tomb-Sweeping Day, is a festival that holds special importance to the Chinese community in Malaysia who still practice Confucian rituals, as families gather at cemeteries to pay respect to their ancestors.

On Monday, Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin issued the Movement Control Order from March 18 till March 31 to restrict the movement of Malaysians for non-essential needs in a bid to curb the spread of Covid-19.

UPDATE: 22 Mar 2020

This story appeared in The Star newspaper today. The United Hokkien Cemeteries will be closing their cemetery grounds in Batu Gantong, Batu Lanchang, Telok Bahang, Paya Terubong and Mount Erskine immediately to Cheng Beng activities until after the Movement Control Order period ends.

UPDATE: 25 Mar 2020

UPDATE: 27 Mar 2020

UPDATE: 29 Mar 2020

This above is a message from the Malaysian Buddhist Association in Penang, which is advising the community to offer simple prayers or chanting at home. Meanwhile, below, the Federation of Taoist Associations Malaysia and The Federation of Malaysia Chinese Associations (Huazong) have also advised the community to observe the Movement Control Order and stay at home for their Cheng Beng activities.

To Cheng Beng or not to Cheng Beng?

The above article in today's edition of The Star newspaper was based in a large part on this paper by Dr Hor Chee Peng (right) who is the secretary-general of the Dr Wu Lien-Teh Society. Read the online version of The Star's story here. Chee Peng is based at the Kepala Batas Hospital where he is in the front line of the battle against Covid-19. His original paper here 👇

Cheng Beng Festival Amidst of COVID19 Outbreaks: What should we do? 

The upcoming annual Cheng Beng Festival (Tomb Sweeping Day) is expecting a rise of returning members to their families. This Chinese custom is celebrated around the world to remember and honour ancestors who have passed away, around April 4 and April 6, with praying activities commence two weeks before. People sweep the grave sites, presenting flowers and placing offerings on graves. Some families visit temples, ashes towers and ancestor shrines to perform the rituals together in crowd. Mass praying events such as Liang Huang Repentance Liturgy at temple premises takes place to repent for benefits of the livings and the deceased.

Amid the outraging COVID19 epidemics, we ought to be socially responsible and share responsibility to protect ourselves, beloved ones and communities at large. We need to adhere strictly to the certain preventive measures to curb the spread of this catastrophic disease. The implementation of nationwide restricted movement order with its aim to flatten the exponential growth of COVID19. We urge for the solidarity from individuals and community participation with united actions against COVID19.

We call upon community and religious leaders to proactively call off organizing any mass public event or gathering, indoor and outdoor alike, and consider to revert to digital platform for public to participate from home. Committee board in-charge of grave sites, ashes towers and temple premises should implement measures following the Ministry of Health's guideline, according to respective setting. Do provide hand-sanitizing and hand washing areas with posters and reminders to ensure good hand hygiene practice. Do institute mechanisms such as staggering visit time, and limiting visitor number, to avoid crowding during peak periods. Wherever feasible, premises should register details of visitors and offer temperature check at the entrance points. Good air ventilation, without re-circulation, within the premises is an important measure not to be overlooked. We should also observe good hygiene practices by binning litters and keep our shared space clean.

Many travel home to part take the ancestral workshop activities, while some could not due to travel restrictions. During this season, incoming family members may stay in ancestral house leading to close contact and crowding in closed space, which is strongly discouraged. There will be varieties of food after the offering. Do not share meals but use serving spoons or chopstick to serve food. Use alcohol-based hand rubs and wash hands with soap regularly, while avoid handshaking and hand touching own face. Wherever you are, practice cough etiquette by covering up your mouth and nose with tissue and dispose it appropriately followed by performing hand hygiene; cough or sneeze into your elbow, not hands and wash with soap.

In the past years, families, young and old, travel together to grave sites to perform worship rituals, as part of the tradition. This year we recommend to postpone the worship on site with alternative to perform it at home over the ancestral altar!  Beside, we urge refraining young children and older persons (>60 years) with medical illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, heart diseases and lung diseases, to attend the prayer at grave sites. They are high risk groups and vulnerable to contracting the infection. Instead, the young adults can perform the ancestral worship on behalf, in fewer number, to convey the intention abiding to their filial piety.

Above all, social distancing is now the greatest call for altruism and humanity for this pandemic! Avoid any unnecessary social or religious gatherings. Stay a distance of 1 meter in radius from one another- to avoid catching the virus yourself and to pass it on to others, especially to the vulnerable ones. Persons with symptoms (fever and cough) must wear face mask correctly to reduce the spread of the droplets during sneezing or coughing. They should refrain themselves from participating in worship activity and family gathering. Family members travelling from affected areas abroad should self-monitor and selflockdown if any symptom develops, especially those with close contact or suspected of having the infection. In fact, stay put wherever you are, and offer prayers through family members back home, to minimize human contact to reduce the spread of the virus.

This year's Cheng Beng is undoubtedly a tough one for many of us! As much as we wish to honour our ancestors and loved ones, they would always want us to stay healthy and well! All of us have a role to play in protecting our wider community.

Dr Hor Chee Peng Secretary-General, The Dr Wu Lien-Teh Society, Penang Clinical Research Associate, Institute for Clinical Research, National Institutes of Health, Malaysia Contact details: 012-4419697, cheepengh@yahoo.com

And Dr Cheah Wee Kooi Consultant Geriatrician and Head of Department of Medicine, Taiping Hospital +60 16-456 6991, wkcheah@hotmail.com

Tan Soo Choon (Class of 73)

Farewell, my friend and fellow Old Free.

An immense honour to have known you.

A celestial display

Weather was fine this morning at about 6.45am; better than yesterday's, actually. So I stepped out with my Olympus E-PL7 camera and took this rather spectacular picture of the crescent moon with three of the five planets that are visible with the naked eye. I know the planets can be a little bit difficult to spot in this image but trust me, they are there.

A Haw Par nude

The Haw Par Villa could possibly be one of the earliest theme parks in Singapore. I haven't been there for a very long time. The last occasion I was there, I was with my brother-in-law, and we had a whale of a time there, making all sorts of ridiculous poses.

Today, I saw this picture of one of the exhibits at the Haw Par Villa. It showed a scene from Journey to the West, where Sha Wujing, the third disciple of the Tripitaka monk, had been overcome by the female spider demon. All these demons were always plotting to capture the monk because they believed that his flesh would give immortality to those that consumed him.

I was staring at the image and suddenly, it dawned on me that in my possession were a number of black-and-white pictures that my father had taken in the 1950s or 1960s. And one of them depicted this very same scene of Sha Wujing and the spider demon.

But there was one difference. One marked difference. The spider demon in the colour image, although scantily clad, was actually wearing almost nothing originally. I wonder when was it that the owners of the Haw Par Villa dressed up their exhibits. Anyway, here are the two pictures.

This image was downloaded from the Wikimedia Commons and attributed to Seng Kang.

Two moons

Just for the fun of it, I decided to place two images of the full moons of February and March side-by-side for comparison. Two things to be noted.

First, the full moon in March was supposed to be a supermoon, meaning that the earth and the moon are closer than normal which gives the effect that the moon is larger. Perhaps so, because I could only detect a very minimal difference in the diameter of the two images when I placed them together. Almost imperceptible.

Second, the weather condition in Bukit Mertajam had been very moody for the past week and at night, the particulates in the atmosphere had given rise to a slightly more sepia-toned moon. I had not attempted to manipulate the colour of the two images.

The moon on the right was taken on 10 Feb 2020, the Chap Goh Meh full moon, so to speak. Meanwhile, the moon image on the left was taken on 9 Mar 2020, almost a month later. In both images, my zoom lens was set at the maximum 150mm focal length. The aperture and shutter speeds might have differed slightly but that is not an important consideration here.

SH Tan's sweet young things

I first got to know of the newspaper called The Malay Mail in 1969 or so. My father bought his first copy from the newsstand and told me that there was a weekly word puzzle game in this newspaper. We - or rather, I - had to cut out a piece of the back page for five successive days from Monday to Friday and complete the word game before sending the set of five pieces back to the newspaper for judging.

The word game was something akin to a crossword puzzle. There were questions and there were clues to consider. We had to fill in the blank spaces in the puzzle with letters from the alphabet.

But of course, it was always tricky. Many of the clues led to alternate answers. It was up to us to consider the most appropriate letters that would make sense of the clues. And a fortnight later, we would skim through the Monday editions for the judges' answers. Although we attempted this weekly word game for about five years, we never did win anything. Not even a consolation prize.

Right from the first copy that my father bought, I was taken in by a daily columnist going by the name of SH Tan. Every day, I would be chortling to his stories which were far, far different from the usual news reports. It was as if he was talking directly to me, and he was clearly a master of that art of writing.

Some would say that SH Tan wrote nonsense. Perhaps that was true. But he did keep me entertained every day with his irrelevance. And I would perhaps even say that my interest in journalism probably began with this man. [Note: In one of my earlier stories two years ago, I had already made a mention of The Malay Mail's word puzzle game and SH Tan. Read it here.]

One day when I was still studying in Petaling Jaya in 1974, my cousin and I decided to visit SH Tan at his workplace, which was the office of The Malay Mail in Jalan Travers. I had with me a copy of possibly his very first book, SYT, which stood for Saya Yang Tau, but is the acronym for his much more well known Sweet Young Things as well. He autographed it when I pushed it in front of him. I've also one or two of his other books but none, in my opinion, were as interesting as his first effort.

SH Tan died on 29 Oct 2001 and Bernama, the national news agency, felt the death significant enough to report it.

Subsequently, the obituary below appeared in the New Sunday Times as a tribute to SH Tan's contributions to the literary world.

November 4, 2001
Obituary
S.H. Tan - Last of a breed
By Philip Mathews

TAN Siong Hoon, known as S.H. Tan to his readers, and simply as S.H. to friends, died last week at 81. But we shall hear from him yet, through his last book now ready for publication.

His publisher, Datuk Ng Tieh Chuan of Pelandok, was among a small group of relatives, friends and former colleagues who bade farewell to this inveterate journalist who practised his craft for 50 years, earning for himself a pride of place in the annals of Malaysian journalism.

The book, to be called Ramblings, follows in the steps of his previous eight publications. It covers similar ground in terms of content, and is written in his usual earthy style. He is as blunt as ever, and - as he would have said - calls a spoon a spoon, not "an implement to transport morsels of food from platter to portal".

As a prolific writer, S.H. Tan had no equal. Everyday for 11 years, he kept up his column in The Malay Mail, a feat no other Malaysian columnist writing in English, before or since, has matched.

He has also regaled his readers who followed him from newspaper to newspaper on both sides of the Causeway and beyond - from Malaya Tribune and The Straits Times in Singapore, to the New Sunday Times, The Star, National Echo and Malaysian Post in Peninsular Malaysia, and to People's Mirror in Sarawak.

He would write about the foibles and idiosyncrasies of young men and women. About language howlers, food, and sex and the single girl. Dogs, horses, and sex and the single male. Mahjong, the war years, and sex and everybody else.

But while his readers loved him, S.H. was something of a loner in the Malay Mail. Like the sans serif typeface he avoided, he was sans friends. Forever morose and moody. Sullen and silent. Grumpier than Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. The reason was not difficult to understand.

It needed superhuman effort for anyone to be bright and cheerful if his working day started everyday, for years on end, at 3am and consisted of making sense of rough copy of reporters who had difficulty separating fact from fiction, supervising subeditors working headlines that did not fit, and keeping a close watch on typesetters setting type backwards. And if the paper missed its deadline, it was as good as a dog's breakfast.

S.H. Tan would leave for home everyday at noon. From 1pm till 3 pm, he would open up and talk to his trusted friend Royale. He would let his fingers do the talking, for Royale was his trusty typewriter.

S.H. was one of the last who fought a rearguard action against the march of technology. He never traded in his manual typewriter for MS Word. On his faithful machine he pounded away, day after day, producing gems of wit and wisdom.

Since he was a man of few words, when he wrote, he wrote like he would have spoken. To himself. In a conversational style, with scant regard for rules of language, structure or elegance. Words were mere tools for communication, not adornments.

Words, words, words. S.H. was, unlike Eliza Doolittle, never sick of them. Over the years, nearly three million words flowed from his typewriter into the pages of his newspapers.

To his critics - and there were many - his writing was pedantic and lacked literary merit. But to his fans - and there were more, many more - he was comic to the core. His earthy jokes, interspersed in his columns in bazaar Malay, sidewalk Hokkien or street English, went down well with readers of all ages and both sexes.

His sense of humour served him well, especially when he faced grave situations. In Ramblings recently, he recounted the days when he incurred the wrath of the editorial chief of the paper. As Malay Mail editor, S.H. had let slip into print a libellous statement about a race horse owner. His paper had carried a letter which alleged that the horse owner, to use S.H. Tan's words "would sometimes scratch a horse, not because it was itchy, but to fix a race".

Alleging that the horse owner would deliberately throw a race was indeed actionable. The error was caused by one of his staff, but S.H. took full responsibility and resigned. Company chairman (the late) Tan Sri Sheikh Abdullah Sheikh Abu Bakar then summoned SH over "for coffee and a biscuit".

When asked what he intended to do after his resignation, S.H. replied: "Oh, I dunno. I have no family commitments, so I was toying with the idea of making my way to Vladivostok, board the Trans-Siberian Railway, and then rough it out till I reached that editorial mansion in the sky." Fortunately, Sheikh Abdullah appreciated his integrity and courage as much as he did his complete absence of rancour over the affair. He had the resignation withdrawn and S.H. re-designated as editorial manager.

S.H. often chuckled at himself, to himself. His ability to poke fun at himself was uncharacteristic of his media colleagues, some of whom had egos that were larger than life itself.

In one Ramblings this year, he said he checked his horoscope on his birthday. According to his zodiac sign, he was "very sociable, with a special need for companionship and contact with the public. Possessing a natural attraction for beauty, has elegant tastes and enjoys the best money can buy, always striving for peace and balance and is warm-hearted, pleasant and romantic".

"But I am anything but sociable," he protested in his column. "I prefer my own thing ... my only special need is for the companionship of my eight-year-old daughter." He had no need for contact with the public. But if it was for cakes and fellowship, he would be at anybody's beck and call. However, in view of his retirement and his "reduced circumstances", the becks were few and the calls far between. As for his alleged elegant tastes, he admitted he had them, but alas, lacked the means to indulge.

Where language and its use were concerned, S.H. Tan would get away with oxymoronic, hyperbolical, or malapropismic words and expressions. He had a nose for useless trivia, and a matching ability to render them interesting for their own sake. For example: Question: How do you describe the movement of groups of animals? Answer: Lions move in prides, quails in a covey, squirrels in a dray, bears in a sloth, elk in a gang, crows in murder, herring in armies, hogs in droves, foxes in skulks, kangaroos in troops, cats in clowders, peacocks in ostentation, larks in exultation, locusts in hosts, pheasants in nye, sheep in hurtle, whales in a herd, trout in hover, swallows in flight and goats in trip.

A former reporter and now a senior officer in the United Nations system, David Lazarus, was a cub reporter in 1969. He says: "S.H. was perhaps the first person to encourage my travel writing in the days when Malaysians did not travel that much. He approved a series of articles in the Malay Mail on the travails of a young man's journeys through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia and Britain. Alas, I was never paid although they were written on my own time. 'I was just encouraging you', said S.H., and that was that." S.H. Tan spoke very little of his childhood, but of what he has written about his youth, it would appear he was the original Born Loser and - as he often said tonguein-cheek in his columns - he continued to be so in later life.

He did not complete his Senior Cambridge, which used to be the basic entrypoint qualification for any decent job. He had no special skills. He began training to be a fitter, a sort of technical assistant, but before he could qualify, the war put paid to his plans.

He was drafted into the British Army, but before he could see military action, was captured by the invading Japanese soldiers and sent to war camps in Indonesia. The end of the war saw him no closer to the dream he never had. With no recognisable qualification, no marketable skills and no money, he was, quite definitely, without hope.

But an impetuous decision made while a prisoner-of-war turned out to be the proverbial pie in the sky. He traded his rations for cash and used the money to buy an English language dictionary which he read from cover to cover.

He applied unsuccessfully for a job at the Straits Times in Singapore and then turned to the Malaya Tribune with a proposition. He told the editor he would work for six months without pay. He was hired, and within a year, promoted to the post of editor.

A few years later, he was in Kuala Lumpur, sitting in the office of the Malay Mail in Jalan Pudu as its first Asiatic editor. The rest, as he once said of a friend, was destiny.

The Malay Mail had started as an independent newspaper, serving expatriates and colonialists interested mainly in matters relating to rubber, tin and other commodities. It also carried the occasional crime story but nothing much else.

To add some colour to this rather mundane daily diet, S.H. started his personal column. The column gave the Malay Mail a reputation of sorts, which some later tried to shed, luckily without success. Sometimes his words would be lewd. He was, therefore, mistaken by many to be a DOM, whom the SYTs, a term of his own creation, were advised by an insensitive colleague, to assiduously avoid. But he was, in fact, harmless.

And luckless, too. They say 'lucky at cards, unlucky at love'. But S.H. was unlucky at both for most part of his life. But his luck changed, quite dramatically, when he was 68. He met and married Wang Swee Tiang, who doted on him. A few years later, a daughter Tze Chi was born, who was doted on by both.

S.H. Tan loosened up after marriage and became quite the social animal, revelling in the company of former colleagues and friends. At a recent gathering of old friends at the Royal Selangor Club, former NST chief news editor and now managing partner of Prestige Communications, Felix Abisheganaden, said of him: "In the office, we hardly exchanged two words. But now he is such a chatty person. S.H. was an efficient editor. He could be depended upon to deliver and deliver he did. Every time." As a newsman, SH was not a crusader or media evangelist. He was simply a man with heart, which he wore on his shirt sleeves.

Academic and literary critic Edward Dorall wrote of Tan five years ago: "He is the typical Malaysian Chinese success story - the youngster from the ulu (of academia) who succeeded in the big world on his own merits." And stood, and through his works still stands, on its summit.

He was probably the last of a breed of newsmen who making it to the top with nothing but sheer gumption and grit. And a large dose of home-grown humour.

S.H. is finally in that great editorial mansion in the sky. And probably having a quiet chuckle. At us.

Flu fighter

Today is the eighth of March 2020. It has been 17 years since the death of Dr Lim Kok Ann, the former Secretary-General of the World Chess Federation. Right now, the world is undergoing great strain from the pandemic known as Covid-19 which previously was known as the Wuhan coronavirus. I am bringing up Lim Kok Ann's name on the anniversary of his passing so that more people will be aware of his other life's work as a research scientist in Singapore.

In 1957 Singapore and the Malayan peninsula were hit by the A2 strain of the Asian Flu. This virus was thought to have emerged from the province of Kweichow or Guizhou (貴州) in China. First reported in February 1957, this virus spread to Yunnan province and moved rapidly through China. Up to 500,000 Chinese people were infected. In March 1957, Mongolia and Hong Kong were hit, followed by Singapore in April. All of Asia was infected by mid-May. The influenza strain was subsequently called A2 by virologists. [1]

In a front page story in The Sunday Times of 05 April 1957 [2], the newspaper reported that hundreds of Singapore people had been hit by an influenza epidemic believed to have been spread by ships from Hong Kong. "The epidemic is widespread," said the newspaper, adding, "On Pulau Brani, 30 cases were reported in one kampong inhabited by workers of the Marine Department (population 200)." Many other cases were subsequently reported in other parts of the island.

Some other excerpts from the newspaper:

Virologists of the University of Malaya have isolated the virus in some cases at Pulau Brani. Specimens will be sent to the World Health Organisation influenza centre in Britain, which takes strains from all parts of the world, to trace how the epidemic is travelling.

The Professor of Bacteriology, Prof. J.H. Hale, yesterday described it as "true influenza." It was impossible to give figures, as it was not a notifiable disease, he said. He said the Medical Department could think of no special measures to check its spread.

"Let it burn out. We can do nothing about it," he said. The wearing of sterilised masks would not be of any help, he said. "I don't want to give false hopes to anyone by asking them to wear them," he added.

Prof. Hale said that members of his staff had gone to Pulau Brani earlier in the week to get specimens of the virus. They had later heard that there were many cases in other areas. They had sent cables to the World Health Organisation in Geneva and London saying that they had isolated the virus. He said Dr. Lim Kok Ann was working on the specimens.

The disease has struck several Asian countries recently. A report from Japan in January said that 200,000 people were affected. In March came a report that an influenza epidemic was raging in Peking, causing hospitals and clinics to be crowded and schools to suspend classes.

Then in April a record outbreak of influenza gave Hong Kong doctors one of the busiest spells they could remember. Earlier this month reports from Taipei described hospitals as "crowded" as the epidemic spread in Formosa.

For a very brief time, Dr Lim Kok Ann was sort of a chess mentor to me. I first met him in 1974 when I was playing in the Malaysian team at the first Asian team chess championship in Penang, and he was the chief arbiter for the event. I had just suffered a bad loss in one of my games and I must have looked rather down and frustrated. He took me aside and gave me some words of advice. Chess, he said, was not about playing tactics randomly. You must have a strategy when playing the game. Strategy, after all, is the sum of all the tactics you put together. The last time I met him was in Singapore, maybe two or three years before his death on 08 March 2003. Already elderly and frail, he kept mostly to himself during that annual Malaysia-Singapore chess match. But he still wanted to play for the Singapore side, such was his passion for the game.

Born in 1920, Lim Kok Ann was the grandson of the Singapore pioneer, Dr Lim Boon Keng. His father was Walter Lim Kho Leng who was the first manager of Ban Hin Lee Bank Ltd in Penang when the bank opened for business in September 1935. Apart from being well-known in international chess circles, Lim Kok Ann had a long and successful career as a research scientist. Stella Kon, his daughter and author of Emily of Emerald Hill, said that as a young lecturer in Singapore, he conducted the world's first clinical trials of the new Sabin polio vaccine for the World Health Organisation in 1949. As a result of these trials in Singapore, polio was almost eliminated throughout the world. [3]

His other contribution to medical science was in isolating the A2 strain of the Asian Flu in 1957. How it happened was that he was invited by a friend to visit Pulau Bukom to see some patients suspected of having got influenza from a flu outbreak in Hong Kong. It was very likely the patients in Pulau Bukom, where Shell Oil Company had a large installation and where some port workers lived, had caught influenza from passengers off ships they had visited. [See Note 1 below] [4]

"I went over to Pulau Bukom with the Public Health doctor and found typical cases of influenza - the patients had fever, running noses, red eyes, some cough - and were miserable," he wrote in his unpublished auto-biography which his children had since released as a blog, Gong Gong Says, in 2006. He took throat swabs and blood specimens and returned to the laboratory where he innoculated some eight-day-old and some 14 day-old chick embryos with extracts of the throat swabs to which a mixture of penicillin and streptomycin had been added.

To cut a long story short, the laboratory tests made him suspect that he might have isolated an influenza virus. As he could not be sure initially, he prepared sealed glass ampoules of the chick embryo abstract and sealed ampoules of the patient’s serum, and packed them off to various influenza centres in London, Washington and Melbourne for further tests. The Walter & Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne was the first to respond and subsequent tests proved that his virus isolate which, although belonged to the Influenza A virus group, was sufficiently different from other Influenza A strains.

His auto-biography continued: "On Monday morning the Singapore Straits Times reported my coup with front page headlines: Brilliant Singapore scientist discovers new influenza virus. In following write-ups they called me Flu Fighter. I did not think that they knew my Grand Uncle by marriage, Dr.Wu Lien-Teh, had published his memoirs under the title Plague Fighter. [See Notes 2, 3 and 4 below]

He then concluded in a rather resigned tone: "The aftermath of my discovery of the new Influenza virus, subsequently named Influenza A2 virus was something of an anti-climax. The main aim of the world-wide WHO Influenza Observer network was the early detection of new influenza virus variants. The A2 virus was present in Hong Kong at least two weeks before it came to Singapore where the virus was isolated about a week after cases had been recognised. It then took a further week before the virus was identified as a new type. WHO’s interest in new influenza variants was not purely academic; WHO had hoped that early detection and isolation of new influenza variants could lead to better control measures because vaccines could be prepared against the virus and populations elsewhere protected against the new virus before it arrives.

"This was a vain hope. It took about a month for vaccines to be made against the virus isolates sent to England and to the United States. First the virus had to be adapted for growth in large quantities, then tests for safety and efficacy would have to be made before the vaccine was actually used. By the time the health authorities had a vaccine ready, the new influenza had arrived on their shores and in most cases, second epidemic waves had already begun.

"Modern transportation enables large numbers of infected people, some not even showing signs of illness to be landed among susceptible populations well within 30 days, the minimum lead time for isolating a new virus and preparing a vaccine from it. Flu Fighter was an empty label; I fingered the enemy, but nothing I did affected its progress round the world."

NOTES
[Note 1: His unpublished auto-biography said Pulau Bukom but The Sunday Times newspaper of Singapore, dated 05 May 1957, had instead mentioned Pulau Brani.]
[Note 2: Maybe time had fogged his memory again, but The Straits Times of 24 May 1957 gave, as a sub-heading on the front page, "High Praise for Colony Doctor"] [5]
[Note 3: Wu Lien-Teh's first wife, Ruth Wong Shu-Chiung, was the sister of Lim Boon Keng's wife, Margaret Wong Tuan Keng, which meant that Wu Lien-Teh and Lim Boon Keng had a tang mooi relationship.]
[Note 4: Wu Lien-Teh was a giant icon in his time. He is best remembered as the medical doctor from Penang that fought and beat the plague in China in 1911. My stories on Wu Lien-Teh can be accessed here.]

SOURCES
[1] Paleomicrobiology: Past Human Infections, p206. Editors: Didier Raoult, Michel Drancourt. Publishers: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2008. ISBN: 978-540-75854-9.
[2] Flu strikes Singapore. The Sunday Times (Singapore), 05 May 1957
[3] The Inspiring Achievements of Lim Kok Ann, by Stella Kon, imbedded in Junior Tay's story called Remembering Prof Lim Kok Ann. Published in the blog known as IM Kevin Goh's Chess Site, 19 January 2013
[4] Flu Fighter. Lim Kok Ann. Published in the auto-biographical blog known as Gong Gong Says, 07 December 2008
[5] Scientists say the flu bug is new type. The Straits Times (Singapore), 24 May 1957. 

Vietnam's coronavirus contribution

RFID @ Penang Bridge

A few days ago, I was at the Penang Bridge office at the mainland end of the bridge, intending to renew my Touch-N-Go card as I thought it would be expiring soon. If anyone were to look at their Touch-N-Go cards, you'd see that the card's expiration month and year would be printed on the back of the cards. Mine said 03/2020.

So I went to the Penang Bridge office to get it renewed. However, the counter staff there said that it wasn't the expiration time yet. He checked in the system and said my card could still be used until the middle of April. So what about the information on the back of the card, I asked him. Oh, he said that was only to indicate the expiration as per the date the cards were distributed to their office. He agreed it was quite misleading to the public and then he proceeded to write the actual expiration date on my card with a marker pen. 😒

But since I was already at their office, I also asked whether Penang users of the RFID tag would be eligible for the additional 18 percent discount. Would I be charged RM4.59 as a Penang-registered user or would I be charged the normal RM5.74. Sorry, the counter staff said. There are no plans yet to extend the discount to Penang RFID users at the bridge.

I was pretty miffed. Shit, I thought to myself, what's the use of introducing a new service when you remove an existing benefit from it? It was simply illogical. So in the meantime, Penang motorists should steer clear of  Lane 26 at the Penang Bridge toll station unless you are rich enough and you don't care. If you are like me, you can save RM1.15 per trip across the water by NOT using Lane 26. It adds up to a lot in the long run.