Mexico: Swine flu deaths increase

I don’t know about you, but I’m up to my eyebrows with the barrage of media coverage on the swine flu outbreak. It’s not that the story is “dumb” as one website recently wrote, but the amount of hysteria behind some of the reporting is annoying.

Nevertheless the story is vital in that it has turned the lives of thousands of people upside down, particularly in Mexico. Mexico City is slowly returning to some sane level of normalcy after days of going through a virtual shutdown. Yet Mexican President Felipe Calderon urged his countrymen to be vigilant when he said today that “it is not the time to sing victory songs or say this is over.”

Calderon’s warning against complacency is well-founded after authorities confirmed a rising death toll from the swine flu:

The death toll from the A/H1N1 flu epidemic in Mexico has climbed to 44 as of late Wednesday, the health minister said Thursday.

Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos also said the number of confirmed cases of the disease increased from 90 a day earlier to 1,160 on Thursday…

He said the two victims died earlier but were just confirmed as having had the virus.

Cordova mentioned yesterday that a World Health Organization specialist arrived in Mexico to work on a vaccine for the alternatively named AH1N1 virus.

Meanwhile, the acting chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today that only 10% of the nearly 900 swine flu cases in the U.S. came from people who traveled to Mexico.

Image- New Zealand Herald (“A man waits for a train to stop in Mexico City”).
Online Sources- Xinhua, The Latin Americanist, AP, The Telegraph, Bloomberg, BBC News