Word: viruses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Relax. Odds are you won’t die of swine flu, and neither will anyone you know. Ongoing research on the virus suggests that it isn’t very deadly, and ordinary Americans who have not recently been to Mexico have little reason to be concerned...
...course, has risks of its own. One big danger is wasted time, which can cost businesses revenue if workers stay home out of fear. Waste can also come in the form of purchasing unnecessary antiviral drugs or face masks, which are basically ineffective against something as small as a virus, anyway (though they may keep out globs of mucus where viruses tend to be concentrated...
...Miguel Angel Lezana, director of the National Epidemiological Center, tried a bit of buck-passing this week, suggesting the response by the U.N.'s World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, "should have been more immediate" after Mexico informed WHO officials on April 16 of a possibly uncommon flu virus, one whose symptoms also include splitting headaches as well as the pneumonia-related problems. What Lezana seems to have conveniently left out is that Mexico as of then still did not have a proper laboratory to test for that viral strain; and that the WHO may not have been able...
...dispute over whether or not the cause was swine flu, as some medical officials now claim, or a more common flu, as Cortes and the rest of Leyva's family just as adamantly insist. What's clear is that if Mexican officials were concerned about a new flu virus as early as April 16, word either wasn't getting to towns like Xonocatlan - and patients like Leyva - or doctors in those towns weren't reporting symptoms like Leyva's to health officials as assiduously as they should have. Either way, a cloud of confusion still hangs over Leyva's neighborhood...
...developed countries like the U.S. As of Friday, the country had begun setting up reliable testing labs; and of the first 776 suspected cases they'd analyzed (there are about 1,500 total), 358 were confirmed as swine flu, with 16 deaths confirmed for now specifically from the virus, almost half in Mexico City...