Assistant director of Hospital Kuala Lumpur Dr Ng Dr Ng Thiew Kim said safety syringes would not help solve the problem of needle-stick injury in Malaysia. "It is like using a hammer - if you are careless, you will knock your fingernail," she said.

This is because most syringes require the use of both hands to activate, and careless usage may result in accidental pricking of o­ne hand by the other holding the syringe.

There is however o­ne type of safety syringe whereby the mechanism of sheathing the needle into a protective sleeve, locking it in place and preventing re-use is automatically activated by the very hand holding it without the need for the manipulation of any external components by the other hand or engaging in additional steps.

There is a local company producing it but I am not disclosing its name lest I will be similarly accused of crass advertising in these anxious times, by Dr Cheah Tien Eang ( Smartlock safety syringes, not the answer to Sars ), as Mr Yap Chin Kwee, the ex-political secretary for our first prime minister, was ( Open letter to Health Minister Chua Jui Meng ).

The cost however is 10 times that of the ordinary disposable syringe. This cannot be helped: Its manufacturer has to pay a prohibitive licensing fee to the foreign patent holder for using its technology; the plastic moulds for its production are also very expensive.

It is natural that this and other similar safety syringes are unlikely, for some time to come, to gain popularity here in our country because of their costliness. In the absence of significant demand, unit cost of production cannot be brought down unless export markets in North America and Europe or China are secured and justify voluminous production.

We also do not have the equivalent of North American Nurses Association to lobby for the compulsory use of safety syringes to protect health-care workers.

So if the government is not insisting o­n its use, why should we, the consumers and the public, who ultimately have the bear the cost?

Are we not already spending too much of our money in dispensaries and clinics o­n prescribed drugs that, whilst having palliative or therapeutic value have, however, no curative properties? Why add to the list unnecessary therapeutic injections (what more by expensive safety syringes) when we can, in many cases, dispense with the injection altogether or have the drug taken orally?

I don't know of any statistics that confirm needle injury as a major problem here. In any case, we are entitled to expect that our health-care workers, doctors and nurses know how to handle the vastly cheaper disposable needles, adhere to the safety rules of application and disposal, and not to re-use or carelessly and wrongly use them to our jeopardy.

Although safety syringes minimise needle-stick injury that transmits other viruses like hepatitis, their appeal is greater at the height of the fatal HIV scare. Though HIV may be o­n the rise, I don't expect that it has reached such pandemic proportions in Malaysia as to alarm sufficiently the public for the compulsory and costly switch to safety syringes.

The flavour of the month is still the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars), and not Aids. I agree with Dr Cheah that the health minister should not, as suggested by Mr Yap, waste his time promoting Smartlock safety syringes over others when safety syringes have o­nly peripheral or marginal preventive effect in relation to Sars transmission.

Instead of safety syringes, financial resources of the state are better spent in managing the environment to clear breeding grounds of the other 'flying syringe' - the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the vector of dengue viruses to which the safety syringe offers no answer.

The minister could spend also more resources to improve hospital facilities and equipment, increase staff strength and provide better training to them. The health minister himself admitted all these would be severely taxed by a prolonged Sars outbreak ( Chua: Prolonged outbreak will result in medical staff shortage ).

Since Sars is a new disease of which there is no effective treatment as yet, it is natural that more emphasis should be directed to prevention and containment of transmission.

Since we cannot for practical reasons, restrict cross-border trade or travels, and since o­ne of the manifestations of Sars infection is high fever, if the health minister must spend money, then it is then better spent o­n acquiring those fever-detecting infrared cameras to be installed in all points of entry, whether by air, land or sea, into the country in buttress of the screening process of arrivals for Sars.