Chinese authorities have been conducting temperature checks on incoming international flights for almost two months now. So last night, when I boarded a Shanghai-bound flight in Tokyo, I wasn’t in the least bit surprised to be informed that the plane’s arrival would be delayed for a few minutes by a temperature check of all passengers.…
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Notably Weird H1N1 (over) Reaction, Japanese Edition
This morning, while signing in for a meeting a very large corporate headquarters (which shall remain unnamed) in Tokyo, I was handed the following notice: Full disclosure: I did not gargle.
Take Y/Our Vitamins!
On Friday afternoon I arrived at the registration desk for an international conference being held over the weekend in Ningbo (by car, roughly three hours southeast of Shanghai). The attendant checked my name off the attendee list, handed me my delegate badge, a tote bag containing a directory of attendees, a bound copy of the…
Shanghai to Mexican passport holders: tortillas are for losers.
[UPDATE: Jim Fallows on PR, nationalism and public health. Highly recommended. By the Fallows analysis, a better title for this post would be “Shanghai to Shanghainese: tortillas are for losers.” A point for which I think there would be widespread agreement. I stand corrected.] In my travels, I’ve learned that nothing stokes the patriotic vanities…
Fever (even) When You Hold Me Tight: Shanghai’s unmistakable H1N1-related PR mistake? – UPDATED
Shanghai Scrap remains agnostic as to whether or not H1N1 is being hyped all out of proportion to its danger. But Shanghai Scrap is not agnostic about whether or not H1N1 hype is dangerous to the media and those who feed it information. Case in point: late this afternoon, Hong Kong confirmed that its first…
May Day 2003: SARS memories for a swine flu present, pt. 2
[Part I in this series, including photos of SARS-era airport health screenings, can be found here.] News reports to the effect that Mexico is largely being shut down for the long May Day Holiday have, once again, put me in mind of SARS and 2003. May 1, 2003, marked my first Chinese May Day, and…
Don’t sneeze at others: SARS memories for a swine flu present
Now that swine flu hysteria is close to full bloom, I dug into the old photo archive and pulled up this classic set of instructional posters from SARS-era Shanghai. For a couple of months during Winter/Spring 2003, these were pasted everywhere – every spare wall (anybody out there remember if these showed up in other…
Bird Flu? Needs more research.
Early last week a Hong Kong infectious disease expert announced that – in his opinion – China was suffering an outbreak of bird flu among poultry. This conclusion was based upon two factors: first, eight people had been infected with H5N1 since early December; and second, Hong Kong scientists had detected H5N1 virus in dead…
The masks are back?
Compared to the last bird flu scare, China seems to be taking the current, unsettling spate of bird flu fatalities with unlikely aplomb. Consider: in January, there were five Chinese deaths from the feared pathogen; for the whole of 2008, there were only three. Perhaps the relative ambivalence is related to the fact that the…
Just in time for flu season … No more quarantine forms!
According to Xinhua: Beginning next month, international passengers will no longer need to fill out a quarantine form upon entering China. If you’ve been an international arrival at any of China’s airports over the last four years, you know the routine: it’s the little white photocopied sheet (in Shanghai, at least) requiring that you disclose…