On either side of the long straight road to La Gloria scrawny horses pull plows across flat sandy fields, sending up clouds of dust that mingle with the early morning mist. For the final couple of kilometers, the tarmac turns to gravel as the road begins to wind a little on its way into the village in the southern Mexican state of Veracruz.
Here, in an unassuming little white house with a blue door, lives Edgar Hernandez Hernandez. A neat four-year-old with a shy smile, he might just turn out to be key to understanding why swine flu is slowly shutting down Mexico and keeping health officials around the world locked in emergency meetings.
“My head hurt a lot,” Edgar told this reporter on Tuesday, recalling the illness that had him laid up in bed for a week at the end of last month. “I couldn’t breathe.”
PHOTO: REUTERS
Local nurses took a swab from Edgar’s throat on April 3 and two weeks later this found its way into a batch of samples sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. By this time the Mexican government was getting increasingly concerned about a sudden spike in atypical flu cases that had begun to kill people.
Within hours they were informed that many of the samples tested positive for a totally new strain of swine flu and Edgar’s was the earliest case of all.
The authorities have so far offered no explanation of why the disease’s first stop in Mexico should be a boy in La Gloria. But residents of the village, many of whom believe they suffered from the disease before Edgar, are blaming the huge pig farm in the area that belongs to a multinational, Smithfield Foods.
PHOTO: AFP
“We are not doctors so obviously it isn’t for us to say really, but it is very hard for us not to think that the pig farms around here don’t have something to do with it,” Anselma Amador says as she sweeps outside her door. “The flu has pig material in it and we are humans, we are not pigs.”
The pigs at the heart of the village’s angst live in modules around the valley in long metal buildings with large rectangular tanks attached. The closest one to La Gloria is a few kilometers back down the paved road and then a couple more down a cactus-lined track, where the wind whips up dust clouds that travel across the plain.
The tank lies open, apparently unattended, a putrid odor emanating from it. Residents in La Gloria say the prevailing wind invariably blows the fetid air their way, where it gets stuck because of the hills that rise just behind the village.
The company has vehemently denied that its pigs had anything to do with the outbreak and has shown journalists around pristine installations. The federal government has also said that it has no reason to believe there is any link.
“I think it is foolhardy to make such a link,” Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said on Monday, adding that the agricultural ministry had regularly tested the pigs and found nothing to indicate an association.
Cordova also insisted Edgar was the only case of swine flu in La Gloria — although residents say his illness came after weeks during which most of the village fell ill.
In February a seven-month-old baby died of pneumonia and early last month, a two-month-old died. The parents were told both children had died of bacterial pneumonia. Then, around March 21, dozens of people started suffering high fevers, terrible aches and sore throats that led to trouble breathing.
The community was gradually beginning to put the illness behind them when they started seeing the outbreak of the flu that has brought Mexico City to a partial standstill, with schools and restaurants closed, and people being told to stay at home if they possibly can.
“I watch what is going on in Mexico City and we say to each other that is exactly what happened to us,” Rosa Jimenez says.
She notes that many families in La Gloria have relatives who work in Mexico City but came back to the village for the Easter week celebrations.
“Could that be how it spread to the capital?” she asks.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS