Word: swine
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...then last week the Mexican government realized it had the more rarefied swine flu (or A/H1N1 virus) epidemic on its hands. Hernandez's husband - who like so many Mexicans suspected of contracting swine flu is of a relatively young age not usually waylaid so severely by flu viruses - was transferred to the INER. "I believe the doctors and nurses are doing the best they can," says Hernandez, 42. "This is just a very painful ordeal for all of us, and it's hard for everyone to cope." (See the Top 5 Swine...
Mexico isn't just dealing with the motherlode of the global swine-flu epidemic cases - 358 confirmed as of Friday. It's also wrestling with questions about what, if anything, it could have done to curtail the crisis more swiftly and effectively. On the one hand, Mexico's response has been largely effective: measures taken by President Felipe Calderon and his health officials, as well as Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, appear to have stabilized the outbreak. Those measures included the closure of all but the most essential businesses and government services Friday through Tuesday, the nation's long Cinco...
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...
Health officials say it could take weeks to determine the swine flu's origin - and some now suggest it just as easily could have been somewhere outside Mexico, perhaps California. But even if Mexico's first-response report card is mixed, its follow-through since then has won praise from health officials both at the WHO and in developed countries like the U.S. As of Friday, the country had begun setting up reliable testing labs; and of the first 776 suspected cases they'd analyzed (there are about 1,500 total), 358 were confirmed as swine flu, with 16 deaths...