Word: haydens
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...Hayden and his family handled this storm of ambiguity with relative grace. Hayden complained only about being stuck inside. "After a while, TV got boring, and then games got boring, and then there was nothing to do," he says. His parents were worried but also grateful that health officials were taking the matter seriously. "Nobody knew how bad anything was going to get," his father Patrick remembers, "but at least we were together...
...word spread that three students at Hayden's school had the new flu, people in his town began trying to stamp out the uncertainty. It was an unsatisfying endeavor. Health officials came to Hayden's house and asked him dozens of questions. Had he been to Mexico lately? (No.) Had he had contact with any pigs? (No.) That weekend, Texas health officials closed all 14 schools in Hayden's district, sending 11,000 children home. Workers wiped down the school district's 100-plus buses. At Cibolo city hall, employees posted signs asking residents to pay their utility bills...
...family agreed to do a local TV-news interview - to show that they were "just a normal family with a virus," as Patrick puts it. Then the national shows started calling. "What was it like when you found out you had swine flu?" a CNN anchor asked Hayden. He replied, in a teenager's deadpan, "I mean, it's just the flu. I just went through it normally." Producers asked the family to wear face masks on camera, even though health officials had told them that wasn't necessary. Meanwhile, regular people, some of them friends, started acting strangely toward...
...villain. Bloggers accused pharmaceutical companies of intentionally concocting the virus in order to sell vaccines. On one website, conspiracy theorists researched public records about the Henshaws and deduced that they were actually victims of radiation poisoning - possibly from a dirty bomb smuggled in through Mexico. As things turned out, Hayden's school reopened about a week later. To make up for the lost time, school officials canceled final exams. With that, Hayden's classmates found it in their hearts to forgive him. The summer brought a new consensus about H1N1 flu to Cibolo. "Now people...
...would all be a surreal memory for Cibolo and the rest of America, if only it were over. Instead, Hayden's case is a flare in the darkness, a warning that as the nation begins its second big battle with a strange flu virus, we are up against a threat that we are not particularly skilled at overcoming, one that provokes an extreme range of emotions - from fear to indifference - none of which are all that helpful. The battle ahead is psychological as much as it is medical. And although we have heard a great deal about the importance...