Word: bonilla
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Back in the cramped Mexico City apartment he shares with two daughters and two grandchildren, Bonilla, 46, a maintenance worker, recounts his ordeal to TIME. He has been out of hospital for two days but is still coughing and spluttering behind a blue facemask, his head aching slightly as he finishes his course of anti-viral drugs. The Mexican government has tried to protect the names of swine flu victims, fearing publicity could stigmatize them. But Bonilla is unafraid to tell his tale, hoping his words will give the world better insight into the H1N1 virus. He also wants...
...runner with a trim muscular upper body, Bonilla says he is normally in good health, and never used to be concerned about flu. "I used to think it was just something that you got in the night and that was gone the next day," he says. He hoped it would be the same when he felt a sore throat and headache develop on April 22. But the next day his temperature shot up to 102 degrees and his throat closed so tightly he could hardly breathe. "I didn't want to upset my wife and daughters, so I tried...
When Moises Bonilla watched a fellow swine flu sufferer breathe her last in the isolated hospital ward, he prayed he would not follow her. The 39-year-old woman had been on the bed next to him for two days, tubes shoved into her throat, her eyes rarely flickering. Although she was unable to speak, Bonilla felt an affinity with her as he did with all his fellow patients, who egged each other on with calls to keep fighting. But she slipped away and became a reminder about how bad things could get. "It was the darkest moment I have...
...Just as Bonilla was being struck down, news flashed up on the television about how the swine flu virus had been found in Mexico. His wife rushed him to a public hospital in his Iztapalapa district and he was rapidly put in isolation with five other patients. "We had no communication with the outside world - no newspapers or telephones - so we didn't know much about this swine flu or how bad it was," he recalls. "When the woman died we were scared that this could be the fate of us all." Their fears only increased when a doctor...
Doctors soon gave Bonilla an anti-viral drug that is known in Mexico as oseltamivir (and more popularly known as Tamiflu) making his condition rapidly improve. In some ways, the timing of sickness was lucky, he says. Once they had identified swine flu on April 23, Mexican health authorities rushed anti-virals to hospitals and found they were very effective. But many who had started suffering before had already developed severe pneumonia; and for some, it was too late to be saved. The errors in treatment in the first weeks of the outbreak do much to explain the higher death...