Swine flu update - May 06, 2009
All Nature’s swine flu coverage is collected on our news special page. These regular updates on The Great Beyond round up the latest from other news sources around the globe.
The first death of a US citizen with swine flu has been confirmed. The Texas Department of State Health Services says a woman with “chronic underlying health conditions” died earlier this week.
There has been one previous death outside of Mexico, when a Mexican child died while visiting Texas. In Mexico 29 people have died.
“She was a US citizen, a resident of Cameron County,” Doug McBride, spokesman for the DSHS told AFP. “My understanding is she had not had recent travel to Mexico.”
AP named the victim as Judy Trunnell, “a 33-year-old schoolteacher who had just given birth to a healthy baby girl”.
Bloomberg says that the World Health Organisation is now just a whisker away from declaring a pandemic, with monitors tracking 57 cases in Sapin and 27 in the UK, “ to determine whether there’s evidence the virus has established itself outside the US, Canada and Mexico”.
If H1N1 has become established in Europe it could prompt a rise in the risk level from the current 5 to the highest stage of 6, indicative of a current pandemic.
The ScienceInsider blog has details of a new possible ‘patient zero’ for the outbreak:
Mexico has confirmed that a person from Mexico City infected with the swine flu virus developed symptoms on 11 March, 6 days earlier than a case that many in the media dubbed “patient zero,” ScienceInsider has learned. The finding not only adds a new entry to the left end of the outbreak’s timeline, but it also calls into question the geographical link between the former patient zero and a huge pig farm.
Meanwhile, the backlash is picking up momentum in some quarters. The Guardian provides a nice example of dissonant views.
Simon Jenkins has written no less than three pieces. He has scoffed at warnings against travel to Mexico, saying “It would make more sense to proffer such a warning against the American crime rate.”
He has warns that H1N1 has led to “Mad journalism disease ... now raging through the media.”
He then claims that “Crying wolf over globalised disease is now so much a part of the medical/industrial complex that no sane person can tell what is real from what is log-rolling.”
The Guardian’s own ‘Bad Science’ columnist Ben Goldacre has taken Jenkins to task, saying on Twitter, “i will PAY fifty pounds to anyone who will print on paper my view that Simon Jenkins (who I usually quite like) has lost it here.”
Casting an eye over the mess is Peter Preston, media pundit for the Guardian’s sister paper The Observer.
Image: Getty
