Word: flu
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...upgrade. Dr. Miguel Angel Lezana, director of the National Epidemiological Center, tried a bit of buck-passing this week, suggesting the response by the U.N.'s World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, "should have been more immediate" after Mexico informed WHO officials on April 16 of a possibly uncommon flu virus, one whose symptoms also include splitting headaches as well as the pneumonia-related problems. What Lezana seems to have conveniently left out is that Mexico as of then still did not have a proper laboratory to test for that viral strain; and that the WHO may not have been...
Granted, Mexican doctors and health officials understandably imagined early on that they were simply seeing a late surge of flu-season activity or, at worst, an unusual spate of pneumonia cases. But the faulty or tardy diagnoses that marked those early moments of the Mexican epidemic reflects what Oswaldo Medina, head of the Mexican Epidemiological Association, told reporters this week is an inadequately funded and bureaucratically sclerotic diagnosis infrastructure. It's one in which the private and public components, he added, too often miscommunicate, when they communicate at all. "Identification of diseases," Medina said, "comes too late...
That appears to have been the case in the town of Xonocatlan, about an hour west of Mexico City, where Gerardo Leyva, 39, a mason, may have contracted a flu whose strain medical officials still haven't definitively identified. According to Leyva's niece, Yazmin Cortes, 30, her uncle began experiencing symptoms in the second week of April, and she says they may have exacerbated heart problems he was having after an electrical shock he'd suffered shortly before on the job. Local doctors diagnosed pneumonia, and Cortes says she gave her uncle regular antibiotic injections, but by the third...
There is a dispute over whether or not the cause was swine flu, as some medical officials now claim, or a more common flu, as Cortes and the rest of Leyva's family just as adamantly insist. What's clear is that if Mexican officials were concerned about a new flu virus as early as April 16, word either wasn't getting to towns like Xonocatlan - and patients like Leyva - or doctors in those towns weren't reporting symptoms like Leyva's to health officials as assiduously as they should have. Either way, a cloud of confusion still hangs over...
...epidemic has passed. The country of 110 million people still has fewer than two doctors per 1,000 inhabitants, almost half the average of countries belonging to the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In rural states and Oaxaca and Veracruz, where Mexico's first swine-flu cases (and first death) are believed to have emerged in late March and early April, access to physicians and nurses is even more threadbare. The nation's public health budget is about 3% of GDP, again about half the OECD average; and its per capita health spending...