There is no such thing as a blood test for influenza. If you’ve been searching for one, you can stop.

Influenza is a respiratory disease, so specimens preferred for influenza testing come from the respiratory system: nasopharyngeal swab (from the upper part of the throat behind the nose), nasopharyngeal swab combined with oropharyngeal swab (from the cavity at the back of your mouth), or “nasal aspirate” (translation: “snot”). If specimens from those locations cannot be collected, a nasal swab or oropharyngeal swab by itself will work.But not a blood sample.

You can read the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on collecting, storing, processing and testing influenza specimens. Swabs, not syringes.

As a colleague related in his account of being tested for H1N1 last month, Tan Tock Seng Hospital in Singapore took a blood sample from him when he went to be tested for influenza. When he asked why, he was told only that it was ‘to be sure you don’t have anything else.’

If medical personnel draw a sample of your blood for testing, they aren’t looking for influenza. They might be looking for bacterial infections like typhoid or sepsis, viral infections found in Asia like malaria, dengue fever, hepatitis, yellow fever , or some other blood-borne pathogen. They could also be looking for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), of course, the cause of AIDS.  Read more... (1165 words, 1 image, estimated 4:40 mins reading time)

A colleague of mine returned to Singapore on Wednesday, May 27 from Boston, USA, where he’d spent the week between May 17 and May 24. He came back with a cold, a bad one.

He was sure it was a cold, not the flu: his temperature had not gone over 36 degrees C (98 F), he had no fever, no headache, no chills. He had cleared the thermal screening at Singapore’s Changi Airport. But he had a meeting with a client scheduled on Friday, May 29, so he informed the client on Thursday, May 28 of his condition. The client asked him to (quoting the client’s e-mail) “get clearance from a doctor that it is just a common cold, and not something serious” before coming to their office. He called his doctor on Friday morning, 29 May.

This is his first-hand, contemporaneous account of his experience as a suspected carrier of H1N1.

9.40 Call my doctor. All patients who have been to Mexico, USA or Canada and who have any of the flu symptoms, have to go to Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) by ambulance. [TTSH is Ground Zero for infectious disease in Singapore. It was the focal point for response to SARS, H5N1 "bird flu" and now H1N1 "swine flu". Five TTSH health care workers died of SARS in 2003 as a result of caring for patients.  Read more... (1489 words, 0 images, estimated 5:57 mins reading time)