Posted on 04/28/2009 1:43:08 AM PDT by calcowgirl
Reporting from Mexico City -- With the death toll climbing, Mexican authorities at the center of an international swine flu epidemic struggled Monday to piece together its lethal march, with attention focusing on a 4-year-old boy and a pig farm.
... The boy lived near a pig farm run by a U.S.-Mexican company, Granjas Carroll, in the municipality of Perote, in Veracruz state on the Gulf of Mexico. He contracted the disease on April 2, Cordova said, one of a group of residents who came down with what was at the time labeled a particularly bad case of the flu.
In Perote, residents of the hamlet known as La Gloria have complained since mid-March that contamination from the pig farm was tainting their water and causing respiratory infections. In one demonstration in early April, they carried signs with pictures of pigs crossed out with an X and the word "peligro" -- danger. Residents told reporters at the time that more than half the town's 3,000 inhabitants were sick and that three children under the age of 2 had died.
Local health officials mobilized when the outbreak was first reported, but they gave a different account: The infection may have started with a migrant farmer who returned from work in the U.S. and gave the disease to his wife, who in turn passed it on to other women in the community.
... The first officially confirmed fatality from the disease occurred April 13. Maria Adela Gutierrez died in the southern city of Oaxaca, capital of the state of the same name.
Gutierrez was a door-to-door census-taker for the tax board, meaning she could have had contact with scores of people at her most contagious point, before being hospitalized. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
for now, i’m not buying this story.
I’m leaning toward the Granjas Carroll story. If you google that, a lot of things are pointing in their direction. They are owned by Smithfield Foods... who seem to be scrambling.
I don’t buy for a second the story about the traveler to the U.S. I highlighted it only because I found it so outrageous.
How in hell is an influenza combining the dna from two snippets of human influenza strains, two snippets of swine influenza - one European and one Asian, and a snippet of avian influenza, going to come together in a remote pig farm in Veracruz province (Granjas Carroll)?
Influenza needs warm bodies to breed within, not sewage pools.
this is crap the first 5 people from CA were sick at the end of March and have recovered
I say we run with that story.
Hey illegals, if you come to the US then you will get a case of the flu.
This is something I am OK with disseminating in that population.
Did you all see a map of the world with all the cases?
made it to many places already!
I haven’t seen that. Do you have a link?
LOL! Nice spin! ;-)
I don’t - it was on The Fox Business Network.
Swine Flu in Mexico - Timeline of Events
http://biosurveillance.typepad.com/biosurveillance/2009/04/swine-flu-in-mexico-timeline-of-events.html
Welcome. Pretty good local data - found one case in my area that I didn’t know about. Googled it and got the specifics.
I don’t think this is any ordinary flu. In the community of La Gloria, where the first boy died (mentioned in this article), over 30% of the town came down with respiratory infections (according to some Spanish news articles two weeks ago). According to the google map, three have died in this small town. The Mexican government is reporting that 1,995 people have been admitted to hospitals for severe pneumonia and 776 patients remain hospitalized (only 53.6% discharged).
The next few days should tell us a lot. Either this thing moves from the headlines or it explodes.
Earlier today I was reading some articles from 1918 in the Los Angeles Times about the “Spanish Influenza,” another swine flu outbreak. They closed schools, parks, theaters—basically all public venues. Cities were locked down. Masks were handed out. I think the final death toll was about 40 million, worldwide. It hit Europe in May/June and took until November to hit the U.S. hard. Today, things move a lot faster.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - New Zealand and Israel confirmed cases of swine flu on Tuesday, the latest countries hit by a new strain that has killed up to 149 people in Mexico and which threatens to become a pandemic.
The World Health Organisation has raised its alert level to phase 4, indicating a significantly increased risk of pandemic. Global markets tumbled for a second day on Tuesday on fears the outbreak could snuff out fragile signs of economic recovery.
No one has died outside Mexico but more than 50 infected people have been found in the United States, six in Canada and two each across the Atlantic in Spain and Scotland. Possible cases were being tested as far away as South Korea and Australia.
New Zealand's health ministry said three of 11 people in a school group that recently visited Mexico had tested positive, and it expected the other eight would also turn out to be positive when tests were completed. The Israeli carrier, a 26-year-old man, had also recently returned from Mexico.
(snip)
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