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Things that just make you go…hmmmmm….Smithfield Foods???
"TRACING PATH OF VIRUS: WITH THE death toll climbing, Mexican authorities at the centre of a global flu epidemic have been struggling to piece together its lethal march with attention now focused on a four-year-old boy and a pig farm.
The boy, who survived, has emerged as the earliest known victim in Mexico of the never-before-seen virus, Mexican health secretary Jose Angel Cordova said yesterday. The boy’s case provides an important clue of the strain’s path.
The boy lived near a pig farm run by a US-Mexican company, Granjas Carroll, in the municipality of Perote, in Veracruz state on the Gulf of Mexico coast.
He contracted the disease on April 2nd, Mr Cordova said, and was among a group of residents who came down with what at the time was labelled a particularly bad case of the flu.
Only one sample from the group, that belonging to the boy, was preserved and retested – only after other cases of the new strain were later confirmed elsewhere, Mr Cordova said. The boy had the same strain. It is unknown how many more of the hundreds of people who fell sick around April 2nd in Perote were also infected by the more virulent strain.
In another ominous disclosure, officials said the first confirmed fatality – from an impoverished state neighbouring Veracruz – worked as a door-to-door census-taker and might have had contact with scores of people.
Residents in the Perote hamlet known as La Gloria have been complaining since mid-March that contamination from the pig farm was tainting their water and giving them respiratory infections."
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/0429/1224245597715.html
And….
"MEXICO CITY — A village near a massive corporate hog farm partially owned by the largest U.S. pork producer is one of three possible sources of Mexico’s swine flu outbreak, the Mexican government’s top epidemiologist confirmed Tuesday.
A 4-year-old boy who fell ill April 2 in the village of La Gloria, in the mountains some 200 miles east of the Mexican capital, tested positive for the new flu strain, said Miguel Angel Lezana, chief of the government’s national epidemiology center said.
The boy, Edgar Hernandez, recovered. And tests in U.S. and Canadian government labs of samples taken from other La Gloria residents — a third of the villagers were stricken — showed the others were hit by a human flu strain, Lezana said.
But a 39-year-old female census taker, who fell ill at about the same time as the Hernandez child, died in the city of Oaxaca on April 12. She was confirmed to have been killed by the same flu strain the boy had.
Two others were sickened by the same strain about the same time in and near San Diego, Calif. — another possible source, he added.
“It’s impossible” that the three outbreaks of the same strain could have almost simultaneously taken place in isolation of one another, Lezana said. But investigators have not yet found a connection linking the victims.
They are looking at the possibility that either the California victims were stricken by a swine flu strain from Asia, that then migrated south, or that the flu produced in Mexico slipped north across the border.
“We have to understand the chain of transmission,” Lezana said. “It’s part of the investigation that has to be done.”
He acknowledged that La Gloria seemed to be the only early outbreak site near a pig farm.
The $58.6 million Granjas Carroll company, which is 50 percent owned by Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, employs 850 people and has more than 50,000 pigs, the company says.
Mexico’s deadly new flu is a hybrid combining human, swine and bird influenza. The World Health Organization has warned that it could fuel a worldwide outbreak, or pandemic, though the WHO doesn’t know where it specifically started either.
“Right now it’s not possible to really know where this virus originated,” said Keiji Fukuda, the deputy chief of the World Health Organization said Tuesday. “This is a newly emerged virus rather than one that has been around a while.”
So far, only 7 of Mexico’s more than 150 reported flu deaths have been definitely confirmed to be from the new hybrid strain. Many others are probable or suspected and much still remains unknown. "…..
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/health/6397583.html
Just for the heck of it there is this article from Rolling Stone in 2006 to peruse…
PS. MODS!! My links never work right…could you make them right so people can go to the links…. :)
5 Comments
Your links have been repaired.
I trust you are using the link button over the text box when you are writing? Need to highlight the http://bunchofstuff etc, then click on the link button. Often you will need to erase what’s in the popup box so there won’t be a duplicate ‘http’ – hope this helps.
And, good diary!
Thanks EG…I’m such a technical moron…I was just copying and pasting like one does in the comments, and that always works for me…I’ll try the linky thingy…I promise…heh, heh..D’oh….. :)
Boss Hog
LS, thanks very much.
Very accessible, very helpful.
Recommended.
” The World Health Organization announced Thursday it will would stop using the term “swine flu” to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs. The policy shift came a day after Egypt began slaughtering thousands of pigs in a misguided effort to prevent swine flu.
WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the agriculture industry and the U.N. food agency had expressed concerns that the term “swine flu” was misleading consumers and needlessly causing countries to ban pork products and order the slaughter of pigs.
“Rather than calling this swine flu … we’re going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A,” Thompson said. “
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..93772.html