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)