The Singapore Crisis Response Network (CRN) provides emotional support and crisis intervention for expatriates from all countries in a crisis. Started by the Singapore American Community Action Council (SACAC), CRN meets about five (5) times a year on the first Wednesday of a month.

If you lived and worked in a foreign country, what would you want or need after a disaster? CRN is thinking about:

You can find Crisis Response Network meeting announcements on the CRN Facebook page; while you’re there, “like” them. Better yet, volunteer. Contact Suzanne Anderson to register for training or to get on the mailing list.

When does your own health stop being a personal, private matter, and become a legitimate consideration in a company’s business continuity planning? In Asia, where many emerging (and re-emerging) diseases originate, that’s a relevant question.

3,700 people died of H1N1 influenza in North America in 2009. In response, many organizations offered masks, liquid disinfectant and nitrile gloves to their employees to inhibit the spread of influenza. In the same year, 3 times as many people – about 14,000 Americans – died of AIDS resulting from the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Since companies distribute masks and gloves, shouldn’t they also distribute condoms? Why are rubber gloves acceptable, but ‘rubbers’ are not?

Disease Risk
In the years ahead, diseases you never heard of, affecting people in places you never heard of, will have in impact on your life, your company and your career as a resilience professional.  Infectious diseases can now have immediate global consequences as they spread around the world quickly through international air travel. The first case of H1N1 in the United States was on April 22, 2009. The first case in New Zealand, about as far away on the planet as you can get, occurred 6 days later on April 28. The first case in Asia was in Hong Kong on 1 May. So, it took just nine days to spread to the other side of the world.  Read more... (5196 words, 2 images, estimated 20:47 mins reading time)

Wearing an N95 mask - or any other kind of mask – will not prevent you from getting influenza, and buying multiple masks for each employee in your office as a pandemic preparation measure is wasteful and unnecessary. It will be more effective to get them to wash their hands regularly, because a primary transmission route for influenza is contact with an infected surface.

In an office, masks are for the sick people, not for the well people. A mask will prevent someone in your office who is sneezing or coughing from spraying saliva, “snot” and “germs” on you and your colleagues by trapping mucus inside the mask.  How many sick people do you knowingly let into your office these days? None. You don’t need any masks for them. You keep them out of the office by screening at the building entrance.

How many sick people do you expect to get into your office in the next twelve months? I wrote in September 2006 that my best guess was that about 20% of a company’s headcount, including visitors and vendors, would catch the flu in any one year. Your company could buy masks for those people, I suppose, if you expect all of them to ignore sensible advice and come into the office sick.  Read more... (1559 words, 1 image, estimated 6:14 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)

Thousands of innocent bankers could perish in Singapore’s next financial sector disaster exercise in 3Q 2008, when the Standing Committee on Business Continuity Management of the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) plans to simulate the late stages of an infectious disease epidemic on the island.

No event in Singapore can be taken seriously until it has an acronym, so an exercise for the Lion City’s entire financial sector is called an “industry-wide exercise,” or “IWE.”

The ABS committee favors a multi-day IWE spread over two (2) weeks. The U.K. ran a financial sector pandemic scenario, “Exercise Winter Willow,” over three weeks from January 30 to February 20, 2007, and a similar exercise in the U.S.A in September and October also lasted three weeks. Members of the ABS committee, who represent big local and global financial institutions, participated in one or both of those exercises and have concluded that three weeks is too long. Senior management loses interest.  Read more... (448 words, 0 images, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)