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.
At a demonstration in early April, they carried signs with pictures of pigs crossed out with an X and the word: Peligro – danger. Residents told reporters at the time that more than half of the town’s 3,000 inhabitants were sick and that three children under two years old had died.
Local health officials mobilised when the outbreak was first reported, but they gave a different account: the infection might have started with a migrant farmer who returned from work in the US and gave the disease to his wife, who in turn proved contagious to other women in the community.
Granjas Carroll, which claims to be Mexico’s leading pig producer at a million heads a year, has issued a statement saying none of its employees has shown signs of illness and noting that the sick are people who had no contact with its pigs. It is but one of numerous farms in the region.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation said yesterday that it was sending a team of experts to inspect pig farms in Mexico.
The Mexican government has parsed out information about the outbreak and its victims only in bits and pieces, refusing to detail who the dead are and where and when they died. However it has ordered all schools in the nation closed until May 6th.
Mr Cordova said every state in Mexico was now reporting suspected cases of the virus. – (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)