*165 - Extra Lecture To Share 1

30.07.2009

For the very 1st time i attended extra seminar and talk organized in my faculty, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, UPM... A new breakthrough i guess...

It is a talk on prevention and control of H1N1 by Dr. Malina Osman from Microbiology and Parasitology Department of my faculty in the main lecture hall... i'll like to share some with u all here...

I complaint before on my previous post b4 tat a private hospital charge rm500 for a throat swab for h1n1 screening... and now i know why... The diagnosis of h1n1 is carried out by PCR or polymerase chain reaction... And those taq polymerase and restriction enzyme arent cheap at all... No doubt government also cant provide throat swab to every suspecting patients...

Next is about the vaccine that u read from the newspaper... Gov expecting it to be available in Malaysia at Nov... But according to Dr. Malina, it is just a vaccine for seasonal flu and its not a h1n1 specific vaccine... Thus we can say tat the effectiveness of the vaccine on h1n1 havent really established yet... Anyway, still better than none right?

Dr. Malina also said tat, recently, a research paper published that potential h1n1 vaccine had been discovered... The problem is by standard procedure from WHO, it needs 2 years to verify the safety of the vaccine... so i guess that when the vaccine got approved, we are having another type of flu edi... aiks...

A very bad news is now the hospitals are full of patients, with deprivation of tamiflu and manpower while our death toll is rising... As a reminder, prevention is better than cure... Go learn on H1N1 prevention for your own sake...