Landscape fires in Indonesia and traffic pollution have been receiving increasing attention as sources of particulate matter (PM) in Singapore. Although mitigation measures to reduce PM levels using portable air cleaners (PACs) have been used in residential buildings, its application for office buildings is unknown. Using PAC, we demonstrated their potential for indoor particles removal in an office building and presented a method to evaluate their performance and estimate number of units to be deployed. Modelled and in-situ measured PAC effectiveness using up to twelve units was evaluated in three office sizes (30, 80 and 1490 m3). Measured effectiveness using indoor concentrations and indoor/outdoor ratios was obtained in a randomised intervention experimental design involving 3 weeks per location. Indoor particle concentration reductions in the three offices were dependent on particle size and confounded by variations in indoor emissions and outdoor levels resulting in low correlation and higher RMSE between modelled and measured effectiveness. PAC effectiveness computed using I/O ratios for removing UFP, PM2.5 and PM10 ranged 24–43%, 23–53% and 7–37% respectively. PAC has a higher in-situ effectiveness in small compared to larger spaces and the effectiveness is logarithmically dependent on the number of units deployed. We validated the use of our model to determine PAC effectiveness in the offices using up to eleven PACs (RMSE between modelled and measured data ranging from 3.9 to 6.6%). Lastly, we developed a design method to size the number of PAC needed for office buildings. The results from this study can be used for standards organization, policy makers and researchers interested in particle exposure reductions in large spaces. © The Author(s).

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Infectious Diseases of Singapore is one in a series of GIDEON ebooks which explore all individual infectious diseases, drugs, vaccines, outbreaks, surveys and pathogens in every country of the world. Data are based on the GIDEON web application (www.gideononline.com) which relies on standard text books, peer-review journals, Health Ministry reports and ProMED, supplemented by an ongoing search of the medical literature. Chapters are arranged alphabetically, by disease name. Each chapter is divided into three sections: 1. Descriptive epidemiology 2. Status of the disease in Singapore 3. References. A chapter outlining the routine vaccination schedule of Singapore follows the diseases chapters. There are 361 generic infectious diseases in the world today. 208 of these are endemic, or potentially endemic, to Singapore. A number of other diseases are not relevant to Singapore and have not been included in this book. In addition to endemic diseases, all published data regarding imported diseases and infection among expatriates from Singapore are included.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9626577/

https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/docs/default-source/ips/ips-exchange-series_no-13_leaving-well-end-of-life-polices-in-singapore_web.pdf

The prevalence of dementia is increasing, especially in Asia. Caregivers of people with dementia are at greater risk of psychological morbidity; however, most studies on caregiving have been conducted in Western populations. As a caregiver’s experience can be influenced by cultural factors, this needs exploring further. This study explored the lived experience of caregivers of dementia patients in Singapore and the impact of caring on their sense of self. Six Chinese female spousal caregivers were interviewed and their experiences were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Four super-ordinate themes were identified: impact of caregiving, acceptance of destiny, taking control, and view of self. The findings reflected the influence of Confucian values. Clinical implications are discussed, including more culturally sensitive services.;To access, purchase, authenticate, or subscribe to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10823-016-9287-z The prevalence of dementia is increasing, especially in Asia. Caregivers of people with dementia are at greater risk of psychological morbidity however, most studies on caregiving have been conducted in Western populations. As a caregiver's experience can be influenced by cultural factors, this needs exploring further. This study explored the lived experience of caregivers of dementia patients in Singapore and the impact of caring on their sense of self. Six Chinese female spousal caregivers were interviewed and their experiences were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Four super-ordinate themes were identified: impact of caregiving, acceptance of destiny, taking control, and view of self. The findings reflected the influence of Confucian values. Clinical implications are discussed, including more culturally sensitive services.

Engagements with personal digital data are growing in recent decades, as many digital technologies offer any interested user the opportunity to track their habits and practices. Yet, far from being objective and neutral conduits of knowledge, digital data is often politicised, invested with particular values, norms, and assumptions about human experiences. Digital health technologies, in particular, are often found to be coded through biomedical understandings of health and the individualism of Western ethics. Such politics of data knowledge inevitably has implications on the ways people in different socio-cultural contexts make sense of their health, bodies, and correspondingly, experience spaces of health through engagements with digital data. Drawing on diaries and diary-interviews with users of digital food-tracking devices in Singapore, this paper develops the idea of ‘epistemological tensions’ to theorise the socio-cultural differences in digital practices beyond the dominant focus on Anglo-American experiences. The findings suggest that people's engagements with digital health technologies can be experienced as ‘glitchy’ and fraught with epistemological tensions, as they constantly position their healthy eating practices between algorithmic advice offered by these technologies, and the socio-cultural norms of health and eating that they subscribe to. In negotiating such tensions, people are also found to express agency that has spatial and temporal implications on their health practices. In sum, this paper underscores the importance of critically situating, instead of simply scrutinising, everyday geographies of datafication. Doing so can yield more contextually nuanced insight into the potential and limits of digital technologies in mediating health geographies in different social and cultural contexts. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a prolonged global stress test in 2020. Southeast Asia is geographically and economically close to China, where COVID-19 first emerged. The region is home to diverse populations, densely packed cities, and a varied assortment of countries all across the development ladder. This article explores the multi-faceted COVID-19 responses of three countries in Southeast Asia–Malaysia, Myanmar and Singapore–countries who share a common history of British colonisation. This article explores the three countries’ overall responses to the pandemic, highlighting shared challenges and divergences based on their respective experiences: Singapore as an advanced, highly urbanised city-state; Malaysia as an advanced developing country; and Myanmar as a lower-resourced developing country.