[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

It seems to be having a higher death rate in Mexico than it does here, although it’s not striking slum dwellers in Mexico, but healthy, prosperous people such as the head of the Anthropology Museum.

I suspect that the slum dwellers live in a filthy environment, so their immune system is already "rough and ready" from the abundance of pathogens. The "healthy" people are cleaner, and their immune systems are probably more passive as a result. JMO.

[muawiyah]

Other way around. Healthy people have more rubust immune systems. That's who this virus attacks the most (due to what they call a CYTOKINE CASCADE event according to the latest theories)

Poor slum dwellers with weakened immune systems, like the very young and the elderly, will shrug this one off like yesterday's Washington Post.

[livius]

The "healthy" people are cleaner, and their immune systems are probably more passive as a result.

I think that's true. But it still doesn't explain why Americans, who are probably cleaner than anybody (!), aren't getting it as severely as healthy Mexicans.

Has it mutated? Most middle-class Mexicans are primarily of European descent and don't have a lot of Indian blood, although they would be primarily descended from Europeans from the Mediterranean region. I wonder if this could be a factor? The genetic material in the flu from the northen Midwest is unlikely to have come from Mediterraneans, so possibly Americans of northern European descent have been more exposed or have more resistance to it than southern Europeans.