Dr. Alan Melnick has an interesting way of coordinating his wardrobe.
At a press conference to talk about recent measles infections, Clark County’s public health officer wore a black pin-striped jacket, collared check-pattern shirt and a necktie with an apparently random artsy design.
Columbian health reporter Marissa Harshman took a closer look at the tie, and realized those designs weren’t so randomly artsy after all.
She described that moment in a posting on the “All Politics is Local” blog.
“My college biology class told me the purple blobs and little Y-shaped thingies resembled a cell under a microscope. So, after the press conference, I told Melnick I liked his tie,” Harshman noted in the March 4 posting.
Melnick replied: “It’s an immunization tie. Nobody else noticed.”
Those Y-shaped thingies are antibodies, he said. The tie also features a little syringe (not shown in the photo) being inserted into a tiny vial of vaccine.
Wearin’ o’ the germ
Later, Melnick said his antibody-vs.-antigen necktie isn’t the only germ-o-licious item in his wardrobe.
“The tie I’m wearing today is based on the H1N1 swine flu virus,” Melnick said Thursday morning.
The multicolored representation of the swine flu RNA, sold by Infectious Awareables, worked for a couple of reasons.
First, Melnick was just getting ready to drive to Olympia to testify at a hearing on a bill about childhood immunizations.
And, Thursday was St. Patrick’s Day— another good reason to wear that tie, the health officer said.
“It has a little green in it.”
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