Nearing the end of the interviews at last, yet at the same time, realising that there remain significant gaps in terms of the people that should be interviewed: people who have seen, or initiated, or contributed to how infectious diseases changed or was controlled in Singapore. It is an SG50 project however, and the strict timeline imposes necessary constraints to how many people we can collect video or audio records from. It is quite likely that we will have to set up a separate round of interviews after the end of the project in order to be complete, although how and where we are going to get the funding to do this is still uncertain.

Most of the hard work this work was done by the team from Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Dr. Vincent Pang from CDC, TTSH, who is concurrently deputy director of CIDER at the School of Public Health. I was away in San Diego and then Oxford (the Oxford trip was particularly interesting and I should write about it some day), and was only around for yet another interview with Prof Paul Tambyah. The people we interviewed this week are:

1. Mr. Tan Gee Paw – Public Utilities Board (PUB).
2. Prof. Chew Chin Hin – Tan Tock Seng Hospital (retired).
3. Prof. Paul Ananth Tambyah – National University of Singapore.

We also filmed the ID Grand Rounds at the National University Hospital (no sound in order to minimise the risk of breaching patient confidentiality). Unfortunately, the attendance was less than usual, probably because of the haze.