THE good news is, there will be no haze today because, according to ST, the winds from the south and southeast will blow it away. Plus, you have the assurance from Indonesia that even if the winds do change, the smog will be nowhere as bad as last year because the authorities are quicker off the mark to stop fires spreading.
“We are certain this year things will be better,” said its Disaster Agency spokesman Sutopo Nugroho, referring to a 61 per cent reduction in hotspots seen 2016 compared with a year ago.
So while our lungs get a respite, some preschoolers are getting their lungs checked. A foreign trainee teacher at Bridges Montessori Pre-school in Punggol has been diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB), making it the second case of TB in a pre-school in a week. One pre-schooler was diagnosed with latent TB which, according to MOH, isn’t uncommon in Singapore. Last week, a teacher from China working in Little Greenhouse Pre-school in Bukit Batok was diagnosed with active TB. Doctors interviewed by TODAY say more stringent TB screening should be in place for foreigners seeking to work and live here.
In the meantime, another foreigner, the Zika virus, seems so at home in Singapore that the country risks being treated like a pariah. Australia and Taiwan have already issued alerts to their citizens, especially pregnant women, about travelling to Singapore. Will more countries follow suit? And what will this mean for our economy which is already not in good health?
To think that this comes at a time when tourist numbers are going up. Singapore received 7 per cent more international visitors in June this year, compared with the same month last year, mainly from China and India, said Singapore Tourism Board (STB) yesterday.
As for Singaporeans travelling out of the country, it’s thermal screening for you if you go into Johor by bus. But it seems those in cars are exempt; they’ll be getting brochures about Zika.
But lest you think Zika is a contagious disease, like TB, it isn’t. You can’t spread Zika (unless you have sex with the patient), just like you can’t spread dengue. It’s the mosquito which does the spreading. So it bites an infected person, sucks the blood and passes the virus when it bites another person.
TODAY had a Madam Ho, a Zika victim, saying this: “I feel very tired… I am only worried that I may have spread it to my family members because I don’t know when I was bitten.” She lives with her two children and son-in-law, and has advised them to go for health checks.
Health checks are good and it’s likely that GPs in the Aljunied Cresent-Sims Drive area – the Zika hot spots – are being worked off their feet by people with all manner of aches and pains, rashes, fever and red eyes. They’re being told to send suspect patients to the Communicable Disease Centre by ambulance as part of the G’s tightened checks – and which only serves to add to the misperception that the people inside are contagious. Again, they’re not. More likely, it’s a kiasu effort to make sure they don’t get bitten by mosquitoes along the way.
We’ve kept the worst news for last. As of Monday noon, 15 more cases were added to the 41 announced earlier, and more are expected. It’s probably too late to trace Patient Zero, the person who brought in the virus. That’s because he or she might have only had mild symptoms and have already recovered. The trouble is while Patient Zero was hosting the virus, some dratted mozzie here bit him.
Featured image from TMG File.
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