Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Open letter to World Health Organization

Dear All,

I am a victim of A(H1N1 ) Virus, in Malaysia. I have two precaution step that I should share.

First, I was infected by my house mate, where I start tracing back to the origin of the virus. Instead of any person, I found out that the corporation system was the main problem.
My house mate worked in a Telemarketing company where it source of the H1N1, and the widespread was caused by the system.

The company are using month full attendance bonus to encourage the worker to not take unnecessary Medical leave, while it work well during normal period. But it had serious negative effect during the outbreak of pandemic.

Where an H1N1 infected worker calculate the cost of taking the medical leave (10% of base salary) is far higher than the unmeasurable cost of spreading the H1N1 in the workplace to himself. The result, more than half of the company worker feel sick during the day.

So, I suggest during any outbreak of pandemic, any organazation should void the full attendance bonus to avoid any negative effect brought by the irrational action.

Second, this is addressed to the idiot gatekeeper (Manager) of the company. When company take precaution action such as checking everyone body temperature, they should not assign anyone with the conflict of interest.

As I were told, the person in charge ask the worker with abnormal body temperature go stand under the wind flow of the air-conditional to artificially cool down the temperature as he unlikely to see any productivity lose due to early release of any worker.

I am deeply disappointed by immature action of the manager who lied to himself, as the result of even wider spread of the disease, as it infected my housemate where he turned infected me, who knows what happen to the rest of the other worker in the same company.

The conclusion, I think WHO should use take note of this two precaution step:
  1. Strongly recommend to Void any Full Attendance Bonus
  2. Educate and assign people without interest conflict for the precaution initiative.
As, for the Malaysia's Minister of Health, they should make use of the law of preventing pandemic by install cost to company and manager who aren't full-hearted to the action of precaution.

For the rest of us, I think H1N1 is a good lesson of how do we react under pandemic, there we can better prepare ourselves with the next. For me, what important wasn't how I suffer the cough, fever, and headache, it is what did I learn from this lesson, and I think I should share it to the world.


Thank you,
Nick Wong