Tuesday, August 18, 2009

My favourite food is fishball noddles.Not any kind of noodles,but mee pok.Mee pok is actually a thick and yellow kind of Chinese noodles and is of Teochew origin.It is eaten in Chaoshan (China, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.It is often made with fishballs,minced meat and have various ingredients such sliced fish cakes,dumplings,meat balls,lettuce and beansprouts.

My kind of noodles?It has a very 'wet' taste,and slides down the throat very easily.Eaten alone,(which nobody does,I assure you)it tastes like flour.So,the cook preparing it has to use their own sauce to make the noodles taste either heavenly,or absolutely insulting to the patron.So,the chef's expertise in making sauces and cooking the noodles to the right tenderness is actually very hard.

For example,most normal hawkers just toss the noodles into the soup stock,and thus make the cooking fast and easy.But,the soup stock adds flavour in to the noodles and thus is able to makes the noodles taste nicer or makes it taste worse,depending on the flavour of the soup.So,although it looks easy,many hawkers cannot make out a good bowl of noodles.

Some of the best noodles I've ever eaten are found in Bukit Batok.The noodles there have a faint smokyness behind it,enhancing the taste of the noodles.The chilli is also self-made,and has a fiery spiciness that goes well with the soft,muted noodles. Also,the fishballs are springy and goes well with soya sauce,chilli or even eaten by itself!That is the charm of fishball noodles:All of its ingredients must be good to makes the dish good,and the ingredients are often split up,but it's always the combined taste that counts!

PARIS - NORTHERN hemisphere countries have so far ordered more than one billion doses of H1N1 flu vaccine, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday, sparking warnings over shortages. Some countries - notably Greece, The Netherlands, Canada and Israel - have ordered enough double doses to inoculate their entire populations.

Others, such as Germany, the United States, Britain and France, have put in orders that would cover between 30 and 78 per cent of people.

'Pandemic vaccine orders put in by northern hemisphere countries stand at over one billion,' WHO spokesman Melinda Henry told AFP.

'In the early days, there will be a very limited supply of vaccine. There won't be sufficient supply to vaccinate whole populations, or even huge proportions of populations,' Ms Henry said by phone.

Intense demand coupled with production delays could create shortages, forcing governments that are preparing for a second, possibly more deadly, wave of flu to make hard choices about who to vaccinate first, experts have warned.

In July, the WHO said that the 25 drug companies which had announced their intention to manufacture vaccines could crank out up to 94 million doses per week starting in mid-October.
The global health body revised these numbers sharply downward when the top half-dozen vaccine makers - accounting for 85 per cent of global production - reported that the swine flu strains with which they were working did not reproduce as quickly as expected.

'The current vaccine strain would only yield 25 to 50 per cent' of the original estimate, as low as 23 million doses per week, said Ms Henry.

Clinical tests have not yet confirmed whether new strains under development will produce higher yields, and initial results for at least one, reviewed by WHO on Tuesday, are not encouraging. -- AFP

The article states that many countries in the Northen Hemisphere (which contains most of Earth's land area and 90% of the human population) has purchased over a billion double doses of the vaccine. Some countries such as Greece and the Netherlands have purchased enough double doses for their whole population!This is an amazing number,and this shows the severity of the flu.

A further insight into the flu is that it's death rate is very low.It's estimated mortality rate is 2.5% to 10%,while real numbers state that in Mexico,the mortality rate is 0.28%,and the US is 0.08%.

Is this really cause for worry?Not right now,because the virus is not deadly,and is comparable to the seasonable flu.Also,many reports death with H1N1 only when their immune systems are very weak,and most of them did not die of H1N1 alone,but actually the combined forces of TWO diseases in the body kills the person.Most people have underlying disease such as diabetes,heart problems e.g.

But what is scary is that this influenza has the 'potential' to become a more deadly strain,in other words,higher mortality rate.The greatest cause of worry is that many believe that this may morph into a very deadly flu,such as the Spanish influenza in 1918,which killed off about 50 million to 100 million people,about 1/10 to 1/5 of then's current world's population.As Spanish flu was derived from an unusually deadly strain of A(H1N1),it is indeed a cause for worry.But will the current vaccines for the current type of H1N1 work if it really morphs into a deadlier strain?We can only wait,and see.