Pandemic Panic

Mexico has closed all schools country-wide for the time being. And in Mexico City bars, movie theatres, restaurants, sports stadiums have also been shut, in the hopes that additional infections of the Swine virus can be limited by these measures. It hasn't been all that long that the world was alerted to this new flu virus, a strain that went from birds to swine to people. The strain is new to the medical-scientific community, but to the community of La Gloria near the Gulf of Mexico it's been known for a while.

There, on a huge U.S.-based industrial pig farm with 907 workers and 560,000 swine, the residents had long complained about pollution. Where hundreds of the town's residents have fallen ill, and three children have died. The stench of the manure lagoons from the pig farm was overwhelming for the people living there. People were being infected with severe respiratory conditions. Complaints of swarms of flies attracted to the manure and infecting people went unheeded.

The people resident in La Gloria know the symptoms of fever, coughing, aching joints, severe headaches; vomiting and diarrhea. "It all came from here ... the symptoms they are suffering are the same that we had here", said one resident. "When we saw it on the television, we said to ourselves, 'This is what we had'." Well, what Mexico has in this new strain of Swine flu is a deadly virus.

Now Canada, the United States and the European Union have officially advised their populations to avoid travelling to Mexico. The U.S. has identified 68 cases of Swine flu, Canada 13, with new cases being confirmed in Israel and New Zealand. Suspected cases have been identified in Spain, Britain, Australia, Brazil, France, Chile, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, South Korea, Colombia, Germany, Norway, Guatemala.

Nowhere yet but in Mexico has the flu revealed itself to be deadly. Over 159 people have died in Mexico; nowhere else yet, other than a Mexican infant visiting Texas. Transmission now has been identified as human-to-human, making the strain potentially more virulent. Yet where it has struck outside Mexico - almost all with people who have recently travelled to Mexico - it has resulted in moderate flu symptoms.

Few patients have been admitted to hospital. Most are isolated at home and recovering at home. One public-health official in Canada characterized the Canadian cases as being more mild than the symptoms evidenced by people experiencing regular seasonal flu - influenza-A, that strikes annually in fall and winter and which takes about 4,000 lives in Canada every year, mostly among the elderly and immune-system-compromised.

Now the World Health Organization has issued warnings for countries to anticipate the worst, to prepare for a pandemic situation. The WHO has elevated its pandemic warning to its penultimate status of '5'. With the international community already enfeebled by a global recession, this new situation is likely to put the world further behind in economic recovery.

Countries are scrambling to ensure they are provisioned with sufficient quantities of Tamiflu to administer to their populations. Some countries have erected trade barriers to the importation of pork and swine products, even though transmission is not possible through merely eating those products.

As a new strain of virus, we have had no previous exposure to, we have no immunity to the Swine flu. There is no vaccine as yet formulated to prevent its onset. The best line of defence remains - as it proved to be the most effectual, during the SARS outbreak - to wash hands repeatedly, thoroughly. Wear a surgical mask in public. Sneeze, if you must, into the crook of your arm. And stay home, as much as possible.

Finally, hope for the best of all possible scenarios; that it will fizzle out without spreading more widely and virulently, avoiding the necessity of the WHO upgrading the situation of the final risk assessment in alerting the international community to '6' on the pandemic scale.