If you really want to protect your friends and family, and you’re not in a high-risk group, my advice is to take a foreign holiday to Mexico or USA or UK, and follow sneezing people around, inhaling deeply. If you can give one a big kiss, all the better. When you develop H1N1, lie down and feel like crap for a few days in your hotel room, ask room service to leave food at the door. When you feel better, enjoy a few days of feeling well, then go to a private doctor and get an ‘all clear note’ and come back. Don’t come back until you’re sure you’ve had H1N1 and recovered! Catching H1N1 in the foreign country’s departure lounge as you leave after failing in your mission would be a disaster, of course.

You’ll be immune. H1N1 needs infected carriers to spread effectively. Just about anything warm and wet can ‘carry’ H1N1 for brief durations, but you really need infected people splashing virus on you to give you a good chance of getting it. If you’ve gone on your ‘H1N1 holiday’, you can be almost certain you won’t be the one to blame for your family and friends catching H1N1.

What?! I think it’s easily as sensible as campaigning for someone to soak Malaysia in bleach for a year.

What makes you think that H1N1 will not kill those who do not fall into the “high risk groups”?
I’m a natural gambler, like any other fool. “Not falling into a high risk group” allows me to cross the road to buy hokkien mee when after I check that I’m over 5 years old, under 90 years old, not blind, not drunk, and not a hedgehog (hedgehog? What’s the local equivalent of an animal that often gets squished by cars?)

I think you might have confused yourself when you read ‘having a strong immune system’ into what I wrote. I neither wrote nor implied it. If strong immune system is high risk, then a person with a ‘strong immune system’ would not take my advice and would not seek out H1N1 sufferers in order to naturally acquire their immunity.

Besides, anybody adopting my plan will be “hurting Malaysia’s reputation”. If you’re not in a high-risk group, and you went for an H1N1 holiday, recovered while abroad and came back, you would never be counted in the ‘infected cases’. By acquiring your immunity abroad, you would make the Malaysian fatality rate higher, even though no more people would die.

draken001 asks WTF
That was my reaction when I saw the fine and jail. Most people will go blind after being threatened with jail and fine and stay well away from the bully. That may well have put the ratio of deaths to reports up. If you felt unwell, you wouldn;t want to report it in case you had reported it incorrectly and ended up flying out of a window! If you felt so ill you thought you might die, reporting it might seem worth the risk!

On the subject of the government’s typical failure to do anything competent online, I note that the state government websites of Penang and Selangor also do not appear to have H1N1 advice. There is a nice picture of the Penang CM on the front of their web though. Very celebrity cult. Does that sort of thing really win votes here? It always reminds me of places like North Korea.

Too late – missed the boat! The MOH seems to have done a proper job at h1n1.moh.gov.my at last. I’m not sure about a Surveillance plan with the title “M.I.S.S.”, but hey! look! The NIPPP is by Health Minister CSL! You would have thought they’d have edited it a bit to ‘bring it up to date’. That H1N1 site looks pretty good now.

H1N1 could work out very well in CSL’s favour. Not only is he the name on the advice on the MOH’s revamped H1N1 website, he appears to be playing things quite straight for once. See (for example) the UK government’s face mask advice:

… there is no actual evidence that proves wearing a face mask will stop you getting the virus. It’s more effective to use tissues when sneezing and coughing and wash your hands regularly.

It wouldn’t be hard to be a Health Minister in Malaysia. Everything is so far behind the rest of the world, you just have to spend a couple of hours reading other governments’ websites, write a summary and tada! You are the expert.

CSL’s attitude may not be ‘good for business’ if you’re in the business of selling snake oil in a pandemic. I think though it sends out the message that he’s as at risk as any other Malaysian. Wearing expensive placebos, in my view, might tempt people to believe that he doesn’t care about those who can’t afford them. Other news today is that the government is considering price controls on face masks. People won’t pay anything to be in good health, but will pay anything not to die!