Via the Latin American Herald Tribune: Mexico Suspects Swine Flu Virus Originated in U.S. Not that it really matters. Excerpt from a long and fascinating article:
One year after Mexico alerted the world about the outbreak of the swine flu epidemic, the country’s health secretary says he suspects that the disease originated in the United States.
In an interview with Efe, Jose Angel Cordova, at the helm of dealing with the April 2009 outbreak of what was later identified as the AH1N1 virus, acknowledges that “it is very difficult” to know where it started.
He added, however, that public health officials suspect the bug “came from the United States and that it was returning Mexican emigrants or tourists who brought the virus” into the country.
“Isolated cases occurred there,” but no one paid them much attention, he said, recalling that among the first cases were two children hospitalized in California for being infected with the unknown virus, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control later described as an “atypical flu virus.”
At the same time in Mexico there were other cases of a flu described as atypical, because it occurred in March and April after the December-February flu season was over.
On April 23, 2009, a Canadian laboratory told Mexico that this was an unknown virus of animal origin with pandemic potential, and that it was the same as had been identified in the kids in California.
Within hours of the notification, President Felipe Calderon and his Cabinet decided to warn Mexicans of the presence of this new virus and about the necessary precautions to be taken.
Those measures eventually came to including closing schools nationwide and virtually shutting down Mexico City – home to some 20 million people – for five days.
Some found the measures exaggerated, but Cordova said that the right decisions were taken, given that health professionals initially feared the AH1N1 outbreak could have been the start of a long-expected global flu pandemic with a high mortality rate.
“That night and many more I couldn’t sleep. There were at least 15 very difficult days when we didn’t know how (the virus) would develop because the number of cases was increasing. We had to send health convoys all over the place to meet the demand for doctor visits, do testing and get some idea of what we were dealing with,” he said.
