Word: flu
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...Still, the Mexico City daily Reforma on Sunday quoted a report from the World Health Organization, based in Geneva, Switzerland, suggesting that Mexican officials should have sent samples from flu patients - including the first Mexican believed to have contracted A/H1N1, 5-year-old Edgar Hernandez of Veracruz state, and the first to die from it, Adela Maria Gutierrez, 39, of Oaxaca - to labs in Canada and the U.S. sooner than April 22. Reforma notes that the first analyses of Gutierrez's blood and tissue samples done by Lezana's agency diagnosed severe pneumonia instead of flu. (Swine-flu victims usually...
...Oaxaca state health minister Martin Vasquez tells TIME he pressed for further analysis and sent more samples - which then tested positive for flu. A week later, Lezana received word in a teleconference with Canadian officials that Gutierrez's cause of death, and the strange cause of illness for hundreds of other patients showing up in Mexican clinics and hospitals, was A/H1N1. Lezana concedes that Mexican labs did not then have the rare and expensive form of PCR and RT-PCR analysis - a means of identifying a virus' genetic makeup - to pinpoint such an unusual strain. (They have such analysis...
...generally praised Mexico's response to the pandemic. For his part, Lezana insists the media "misinterpreted" his quote in an Associated Press article last week suggesting the WHO itself should have acted in a "more immediate" manner after Mexico informed it on April 16 that the flu strain that had killed Gutierrez seemed abnormal. "I wasn't claiming any delay on the WHO's part," Lezana tells TIME. What he was noting, he says, was that because the flu strain seemed atypical, there was a generalized fear among health officials "that we might not be able to learn its transmission...
...Lezana says Mexican and international virus sleuths are "much closer than we were a week ago" to determining the geographical, animal and human origins of the swine-flu outbreak - which may not even be in Mexico. (Until late last week, most media reports speculated that Hernandez's village in Veracruz, La Gloria de Perote, where large pig farms are located, was ground zero, but many Mexican and international health officials now say it could be in California or even Asia.) But it could take weeks if not months for a final answer...
...moved from health to the economy. The global financial crisis has already battered Mexico; now tourism, one of the nation's top three sources of income along with oil and migrant-worker remittances, stands to take a severe hit because of the epidemic scare. (See the top 5 swine-flu...