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BREAKING NEWS –
WHO chief to raise pandemic alert level to 5
See my other diaries here, here and over @ET here.
My recent comment: Tall Tales Across the Rio Grande. IMO Mexico thinks it can get away with no testing near “point zero” at La Gloria near the Springfield pig farms.
The WHO and western nations will have a chance to develop a vaccin the coming months before a new wave of cases will develop this fall. Fall and winter is the season of colds and influenze, spreading the virus within communities. Unfortunately, Australia and New Zealand (Southern Hemisphere) could see the virus spread in their upcoming winter season.
(Scoop.nz) – Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with anti-viral drugs and (if available) a vaccine.
An army of skeptics has rightly contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in the case of avian flu) faster than the WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often nonexistent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases.
But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the U.S. and Britain, which prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot Lines, rather than dramatically increase aid to epidemic frontlines overseas–as well as to Big Pharma, which has battled Third World demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche’s Tamiflu.
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MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s chief epidemiologist, Dr. Miguel Angel Lezana, told the AP that while Mexico waited for WHO to help, Mexican authorities tried to identify the outbreak and stop it. Mexican medical teams interviewed 472 people who may have come into contact with the first known swine flu fatality, a 39-year-old woman.
But only 18 of the 472, all hospital workers, were tested for swine flu. Of those 18 saliva samples, 12 failed to gather enough cells to be tested, the state epidemiologist said. And in other parts of Mexico, health workers only this week started visiting the families of victims to find out whether they contracted it as well.
1 May 2009 — The situation continues to evolve. As of 19:00 GMT, 1 May 2009, 13 countries have officially reported 365 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infection.
The United States Government has reported 141 laboratory confirmed human cases, including one death. Mexico has reported 156 confirmed human cases of infection, including nine deaths.
IMO Mexico is underreporting their numbers or data is poor due to lack of test facilities. All 209 confirmed cases outside of Mexico are linked to travel in Mexico. Contraction of the virus would imply a multiple of infected persons in Mexico.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
CNN does not provide accurate information on timeline of H1N1 developments in La Gloria, Mexico.
(JohnBatchelor) – Days after the European media identified the the mega pig farm “manure lagoon” of La Gloria in Veracruz State as the most likely source of the A/H1Ni outbreak, the chief epidemiologist of Mexico M.A. Lezana has directly challenged the solution “Highly improbable,” asserts Dr. Lezana. Smithfield Foods of Virginia asserts that it’s one million pigs in the CAFO at La Gloria are virus free and that it is a Mexican company to blame. Lezana’s office says that the pigs at La Gloria are from North America and the genetic material in the virus are from North America and Europe.
“The company also noted that its joint ventures in Mexico routinely administer influenza virus vaccination to their swine herds and conduct monthly tests for the presence of swine influenza.”
Earlier reports, also in the Guardian.
(HuffingtonPost/AP) – Until now, the first flu death confirmed by Mexican authorities had been a woman in the southern state of Oaxaca, who died on April 13. But Health Secretary Cordova “suggested an earlier timeline for documented swine flu cases.” Cordova said “tests now show that a 4-year-old boy contracted the disease at least two weeks earlier in neighboring Veracruz state, where a community has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm,” the AP says. “The farm is run by Granjas Carroll de Mexico, a joint venture 50 percent owned by Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, Inc.”
Company officials said there were no “clinical signs or symptoms” of swine influenza in their vast herds anywhere in Mexico, “But local residents are convinced they were sickened by air and water contamination from pig waste,” according to AP. “There was a widespread outbreak of a particularly powerful respiratory disease in the area early April, and some people reported being sick as early as February. Local health workers intervened in early April, sealing off the town of La Gloria and spraying to kill off flies they said were swarming through their homes.”
Cordova said people in the town had normal flu, and only one sample was preserved — that belonging to the four-year-old boy. It was only after U.S. and Canadian epidemiologists discovered the true nature of the virus that Mexico submitted the sample for international testing, and discovered what he suffered from. Epidemiologists want to take a closer look at pigs in Mexico as a potential source of the outbreak.
In the town of Xonacatlan, just west of Mexico City, Antonia Cortes Borbolla told The Associated Press that nobody has given her medicine in the week since her husband succumbed to raging fever and weakened lungs that a lab has confirmed as swine flu.
No health workers have inspected her home, asked how her husband might have contracted the illness or tested the neighbors’ pigs, she said.
Cordova acknowledged that her case isn’t unique. “We haven’t given medicine to all of them because we still don’t have enough personnel,” he said.
≈ Cross-posted from a diary — @ET ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."