Among the best preventative measures you can take:
posted by Wong Soon Yim at
3:54 pm
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Turn kitchen waster to DIY natural household cleaners.
Natural household cleaner; air purifier; deodoriser; insecticide; detergent; body care; car care; organic fertiliser, etc
methane gas released from disposed garbage can trap 21 times more heat than CO2, worsen the global warming condition.
Remove odour. Dissolve toxic air released from smoking, car exhaust, chemical residues from household products, etc.
Enzyme that flow underground will eventually purify the river and the sea.
Reduce mosquitoes, flies, rats or cockroaches, etc
Natural antiseptic for your home
Release residues accumulated in the pipe of basins or toilet bowls.
is a complex solution produced by fermentation of fresh kitchen waster (fruits and vegetables dregs), sugar (brown sugar, jiggery or molasses sugar) and water. It is dark brown and has a strong sweet sour fermented scent. Garbage enzyme is a multipurpose liquid and its applications covers household, agriculture, animal husbandry, etc. Garbage enzyme is developed by Dr. Rosukon from Thailand. She has been actively involved enzyme research for more than 30 years and encourages people to make garbage enzyme at home to ease global warming.
From day one you start making garbage enzyme, its catalyses process will release ozone gas (O3). O3 can reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and heavy metal that traps heat in the cloud. Hence heat can be released from the Earth, reducing greenhouse and global warming effects.
Enzyme converts ammonia to nitrate (NO3), a natural hormone and nutrient for plants. Meanwhile it converts carbon dioxide to carbonate (CO3) which is beneficial to sea plant and marine life.
CONTAINER: Air tight plastic container.
INGREDIENTS: Water, fruit and vegetables dregs, sugar (brown sugar, jaggry, or molasses sugar).
Step 110 parts water (fill up 60% of container)
1 part sugar (=10% water content)
3 parts kitchen waste (fill up to 80% full)
Close tight and keep for 3 months (open daily to release gases for first month)
| Ingredient | Ratio | Example 1 | Example 2 | Example 3 |
SUGAR | 1 | 1 kg | 2 kg | 0.5 kg |
VEGETABLE/FRUIT DREGS | 3 | 3 kg | 6 kg | 1.5 kg |
WATER | 10 | 10 Litres | 20 Litres | 5 Litres |
Garbage enzyme can be used diluted with water at a specific dilution ratio.
Dilute to 1000 times with water for use as natural insecticides, herbicides, pesticides and organic fertilisers. Also can be used to stimulate plant hormone to improve quality of fruits and vegetables and to increase crop yield.
Spray on land for 3 months continuously to improve soil quality.
DILUTION RATE | USAGE | QUANTITY | APPLICATION |
Concentrated enzyme | Bath (add in bath water to improve skin condition) | 50-100cc | Keep overnight |
Washing machine (clean and soften laundry) | 20-50cc | Soak and wash | |
Toilet bowl (prevent blockage & purify sewage) | 250cc | Pour and wash | |
Toilet cistern (purify water) | 20-50cc (two caps) | 2-3 times/ weeks | |
Garden pond & water tank (purify water) | 1/10,000 litre water | Add occasionally | |
Leather sofa (clean mold and stain) | Appropriate amount | Spray and wipe every 10 days | |
10-50 times | Carpet & tatami mat (deodorise & antiseptic) | Slightly moist | Spray 1-2 times/month |
Shoe, inside the car (deodorise & antiseptic) | Appropriate amount | Spray occasionally | |
Kitchen sink, stove, cooker hood(clean oily stain) | Appropriate amount | Soak and wipe occasionally | |
Black mold (antifungal) | Appropriate amount | Soak and wipe occasionally | |
Pet excretion, pet house (deodorise & antiseptic) | Appropriate amount | Spray occasionally | |
200 – 500 times | Air-cond room (humidifier, deodorise & antiseptic) | Appropriate amount | Spray occasionally |
500 times | Bathroom sink (clean) | Appropriate amount | Soak and wipe occasionally |
Cabinet and refrigerator (deodorise) | Appropriate amount | Spray occasionally | |
Drain (prevent drainpipe blockage) | Appropriate amount | Flush occasionally | |
Pet (bathing, deodorise & antiseptic) | Appropriate amount | Upon bathing or brushing | |
Toilet (clean, deodorise & pest control) | Appropriate amount | Spray when wiping | |
500-1000 times | Indoor (purify air, deodorise & pest control) | Appropriate amount | Spray frequently |
Closet, clothes (deodorise & antiseptic) | Slightly moist | Spray occasionally | |
1000 times | Seeding and planting (fertiliser) | Appropriate amount | Rinse once |
For shampoo, dish wash, laundry liquid etc; use enzyme to multiply and to reduce chemical residues.
Ratio = 1 part enzyme : 1 part detergent/cleaner : 10 parts water
Add 30 ml (2 tbsp) enzyme to 1 litre water. Soak for 45 minutes.
Add 30ml (2 tbsp) enzyme to moping water. To clean and sterilise.
As a result of catalysis, ozone is produced which can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and this in turn reduces global warming.
This enzyme can be produced easily with the organic waste from our kitchens.
During enzyme production, O3 + NO3 + CO3 are generated and these could help purify and whiten the clouds in the sky. Those clouds that trap lots of heavy metals appear dark. Those dark clouds cause more heat to be trapped on earth due to the greenhouse effect. O3 (ozone) from the garbage enzymes could reduce the heavy metals in the clouds and this would reduce global warming.
More NO3 (nitrite) in the air is useful as nutrients for the plants and soil.
posted by Wong Soon Yim at
11:58 am
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Here's what you need to know:
Q: How do I protect myself and my family?
A: For now, take commonsense precautions. Cover your coughs and sneezes, with a tissue that you throw away or by sneezing into your elbow rather than your hand. Wash hands frequently; if soap and water aren't available, hand gels can substitute. Stay home if you're sick and keep children home from school if they are.
Q: How easy is it to catch this virus?
A: Scientists don't yet know if it takes fairly close or prolonged contact with someone who's sick, or if it's more easily spread. But in general, flu viruses spread through uncovered coughs and sneezes or — and this is important — by touching your mouth or nose with unwashed hands. Flu viruses can live on surfaces for several hours, like a doorknob just touched by someone who sneezed into his hand.
Q: In Mexico, officials are handing out face masks. Do I need one?
A: The CDC says there's not good evidence that masks really help outside of health care settings. It's safer just to avoid close contact with someone who's sick and avoid crowded gatherings in places where swine flu is known to be spreading. But if you can't do that, CDC guidelines say it's OK to consider a mask — just don't let it substitute for good precautions.
Q: Is swine flu treatable?
A: Yes, with the flu drugs Tamiflu or Relenza, but not with two older flu medications.
Q: Is there enough?
A: Yes. The federal government has stockpiled enough of the drugs to treat 50 million people, and many states have additional stocks. As a precaution, the CDC has shipped a quarter of that supply to the states to keep on hand just in case the virus starts spreading more than it has so far.
Q: Should I take Tamiflu as a precaution if I'm not sick yet?
A: No. "What are you going to do with it, use it when you get a sniffle?" asks Dr. Marc Siegel of New York University Langone Medical Center and author of "Bird Flu: Everything you Need To Know About The Next Pandemic." Overusing antiviral drugs can help germs become resistant to them.
Q: How big is my risk?
A: For most people, very low. Outside of Mexico, so far clusters of illnesses seem related to Mexican travel. New York City's cluster, for instance, consists of students and family members at one school where some students came back ill from spring break in Mexico.
Q: Why are people dying in Mexico and not here?
A: That's a mystery. First, understand that no one really knows just how many people in Mexico are dying of this flu strain, or how many have it. Only a fraction of the suspected deaths have been tested and confirmed as swine flu, and some initially suspected cases were caused by something else.
Q: Should I cancel my planned trip to Mexico?
A: The U.S. did issue a travel advisory Monday discouraging nonessential travel there.
Q: What else is the U.S., or anyone else, doing to try to stop this virus?
A: The U.S. is beginning limited screening of travelers from Mexico, so that the obviously sick can be sent for treatment. Other governments have issued their own travel warnings and restrictions. Mexico is taking the biggest steps, closings that limit most crowded gatherings. In the U.S., communities with clusters of illness also may limit contact — New York closed the affected school for a few days, for example — so stay tuned to hear if your area eventually is affected.
Q: What are the symptoms?
A: They're similar to regular human flu — a fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. Some people also have diarrhea and vomiting.
Q: How do I know if I should see a doctor? Maybe my symptoms are from something else — like pollen?
A: Health authorities say if you live in places where swine flu cases have been confirmed, or you recently traveled to Mexico, and you have flulike symptoms, ask your doctor if you need treatment or to be tested. Allergies won't cause a fever. And run-of-the-mill stomach bugs won't be accompanied by respiratory symptoms, notes Dr. Wayne Reynolds of Newport News, Va., spokesman for the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Q: Is there a vaccine to prevent this new infection?
A: No. And CDC's initial testing suggests that last winter's flu shot didn't offer any cross-protection.
Q: How long would it take to produce a vaccine?
A: A few months. The CDC has created what's called "seed stock" of the new virus that manufacturers would need to start production. But the government hasn't yet decided if the outbreak is bad enough to order that.
Q: What is swine flu?
A: Pigs spread their own strains of influenza and every so often people catch one, usually after contact with the animals. This new strain is a mix of pig viruses with some human and bird viruses. Unlike more typical swine flu, it is spreading person-to-person. A 1976 outbreak of another unusual swine flu at Fort Dix, N.J., prompted a problematic mass vaccination campaign, but that time the flu fizzled out.
Q: So is it safe to eat pork?
A: Yes. Swine influenza viruses don't spread through food.
Q: And whatever happened to bird flu? Wasn't that supposed to be the next pandemic?
A: Specialists have long warned that the issue is a never-before-seen strain that people have little if any natural immunity to, regardless of whether it seems to originate from a bird or a pig. Bird flu hasn't gone away; scientists are tracking it, too.
by Dr. Richard Besser, acting chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
posted by Wong Soon Yim at
10:37 am
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1. Is this a flu pandemic?
The influenza virus is constantly mutating. That's why we can't get full immunity to the flu, the way we can to diseases like chicken pox, because there are multiple strains of the flu virus and they change from year to year. However, even though the virus makes us sick, our immune systems can usually muster enough of a response so that the flu is rarely fatal for healthy people.
But every once in awhile, the virus shifts its genetic structure so much that our immune systems offer no protection whatsoever. (This usually happens when a flu virus found in animals - like the avian flu still circulating in Asia - swaps genes with other viruses in a process called reassortment, and jumps to human beings.) A flu pandemic occurs when a new flu virus emerges for which humans have little or no immunity and then spreads easily from person to person around the world. In the 20th century we had two mild flu pandemics, in 1968 and 1957, and the severe "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 40 to 50 million people worldwide.
The WHO has the responsibility of declaring when a new flu pandemic is underway, and to simplify the process, the U.N. body has established six pandemic phases. Thanks to H5N1 avian flu, which has killed 257 people since 2003 but doesn't spread very well from one human to another, we're currently at phase 3. If the WHO upgraded that status to phase 4, which is marked by a new virus that begins to pass easily enough from person to person that we can detect community-sized outbreaks, such a move would effectively mean that we've got a pandemic on our hands.
The H1N1 swine flu virus has already been identified as a new virus, with genes from human and avian flus as well as the swine variety. And since it is apparently causing large-scale outbreaks in Mexico, along with separate confirmed cases in the U.S. and Canada and suspected cases in other countries, it would seem that we've already met the criteria for phase 4. But though an emergency committee met on April 25 to evaluate the situation, the WHO hasn't made the pandemic declaration yet. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's interim assistant director-general for health, security and environment, said on Sunday that its experts "would like a little bit more information and a little bit more time to consider this." The committee is set to meet again by April 28 at the latest.
As health officials have repeatedly emphasized, with good reason, the swine flu situation is evolving rapidly, and more lab tests are needed to ascertain exactly what is going on in Mexico and elsewhere. "We want to make sure we're on solid ground," said Fukuda, a highly respected former CDC official and flu expert.
2. What will happen if this outbreak gets classified as a pandemic?
Moving the world to pandemic phase 4 would be the signal for serious containment actions to be taken on the national and international level. Given that these actions would have major implications for the global economy, not to mention the effects of the public fear that would ensue, there is concern that the WHO may be considering politics along with science. "What the WHO did makes no sense," says Osterholm. "In a potential pandemic, you need to have the WHO be beyond question, and (April 25) was not a good day for them."
Of course, declaring a pandemic isn't a decision that should be taken lightly. For the WHO, phase 4 might trigger an attempt to keep the virus from spreading by instituting strict quarantines and blanketing infected areas with antivirals. But we appear to have missed the opportunity to contain the disease at its source since the virus is already crossing borders with ease. "We cannot stop this at the border," said Anne Schuchat, the CDC's interim director for science and public health. "We don't think that we can quench this in Mexico if it's in many communities now."
That would leave the WHO and individual countries to fall back on damage control, using antivirals and old-fashioned infection control - like closing schools, limiting public gatherings and even restricting travel - to slow the spread of the virus. But such efforts would likely inflict serious damage on an already faltering global economy - and the truth is, we don't know how well those methods will work.
3. Why have the U.S. cases been so much milder than the ones in Mexico?
This is the question that has health officials from Geneva to Washington puzzled. In Mexico, swine flu has caused severe respiratory disease in a number of patients - and even more worryingly, has killed the sort of young and healthy people who can normally shrug off the flu. (Fueling such concerns is the fact that similar age groups died in unusually high numbers during the 1918 pandemic.) Yet the cases in the U.S. have all been mild and likely wouldn't have even garnered much attention if doctors hadn't begun actively looking for swine flu in recent days. "What we're seeing in this country so far is not anywhere near the severity of what we're hearing about in Mexico," said the CDC's Besser. "We need to understand that."
Some of the difference may be due to the fact that Mexico has apparently been grappling with swine flu for weeks longer than the U.S. As doctors across the U.S. begin checking patients with respiratory symptoms for swine flu, CDC officials expect to see more severe cases in the U.S. as well - and as better epidemiological work is done in Mexico, we'll probably hear about more mild cases there too. Right now, however, the true severity of the H1N1 swine flu virus is still an open question, whose answer could change over time. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic began with a fairly mild wave of infections in the spring, but the virus returned a few months later in a far more virulent form. That could happen with the current swine flu as well. "It's quite possible for this virus to evolve," said Fukuda. "When viruses evolve, clearly they can become more dangerous to people."
4. How ready is the U.S. - and the world - to respond to a flu pandemic?
In some ways, the world is better prepared for a flu pandemic today than it has ever been. Thanks to concerns over H5N1 avian flu, the WHO, the U.S. and countries around the world have stockpiled millions of doses of antivirals that can help fight swine flu as well as other strains of influenza. The U.S. has a detailed pandemic preparation plan that was drafted under former President George W. Bush. Many other countries have similar plans. SARS and bird flu have given international health officials useful practice runs for dealing with a real pandemic. We can identify new viruses faster than ever before, and we have life-saving technologies - like artificial respirators and antivirals - that weren't available back in 1918. "I believe that the world is much, much better prepared than we have ever been for dealing with this kind of situation," said Fukuda.
At the same time, the very nature of globalization puts us at greater risk. International air travel means that infections can spread very quickly. And while the WHO can prepare a new swine flu vaccine strain in fairly short order, we still use a laborious, decades-old process to manufacture vaccines, meaning it would take months before the pharmaceutical industry could produce its full capacity of doses - and even then, there wouldn't be enough for everyone on the planet. The U.S. could be particularly vulnerable; only one plant, in Stillwater, Penn., makes flu vaccine in America. In a pandemic, that could produce some ugly political debates. "Do you really think the E.U. is going to release pandemic vaccine to the U.S. when its own people need it?" asks Osterholm.
Indeed, the greatest risk from a pandemic might not turn out to be from the swine flu virus itself - especially if it ends up being relatively mild - but what Osterholm calls "collateral damage" if governments respond to the emergency by instituting border controls and disrupting world trade. Not only would the global recession worsen - a 2008 World Bank report estimated that a severe pandemic could reduce the world's GDP by 4.8% - but we depend on international trade now for countless necessities, from generic medicines to surgical gloves. The just-in-time production systems embraced by companies like Wal-Mart - where inventories are kept as low as possible to cut waste and boost profit - mean that we don't have stockpiles of most things. Supply chains for food, medicines and even the coal that generates half our electricity are easily disruptable, with potentially catastrophic results. Though we'll likely hear calls to close the border with Mexico, Osterholm points out that a key component used in artificial respirators comes from Mexico. "We are more vulnerable to a pandemic now than at any other time over the past 100 years," he says. "We can't depend on ourselves."
5. So how scared should we be?
That depends on whom you ask. Officials at the CDC and the WHO have emphasized that while the swine flu situation is serious, they're responding with an abundance of precautions. Even Osterholm, who has been highly critical of the U.S. government's long-term failures to better prepare for a pandemic, gives the CDC a 9 out of 10 for its response so far. Outside of Mexico, the swine flu hasn't looked too serious yet - unlike during the SARS outbreaks of 2003, when an entirely new virus with no obvious treatment took the world by surprise. In the U.S., the normal flu season is winding down, which should make it easier for public-health officials to pick out swine flu cases from run-of-the-mill respiratory disease. And there are simple things that people can do to protect themselves, like practicing better hygiene (wash hands frequently and cover mouth and nose when sneezing) and staying away from public places or traveling if they feel sick. "There's a role for everyone to play when an outbreak is ongoing," said Besser.
But the truth is that every outbreak is unpredictable, and there's a lot we don't know yet about the new swine flu. There hasn't been a flu pandemic for more than a generation, and there hasn't been a truly virulent pandemic since long before the arrival of mass air transit. We're in terra incognito here. Panic would be counterproductive - especially if it results in knee-jerk reactions like closing international borders, which would only complicate the public-health response. But neither should we downplay our very real vulnerabilities. As Napolitano put it: "This will be a marathon, not a sprint." Be prepared.posted by Wong Soon Yim at
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Makan Bola, Tidur Bola, Kerja Bola, Tengok Bola... Tiap-tiap Hari Bola!!
I am a Chinese by birth, a Malaysian by law, a project engineer by profession, and a gamer by heart. Well, that's how I define myself. I come from Penang Island, a high density island north of Peninsula Malasyia. I have done my schooling at Chung Hwa and Penang Free School and graduation from UPM, Serdang, Selangor. From my childhood, I have been a dreamer. I used to dream of everything... and now is... politic ^^
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