You can’t have failed to notice that Mexico is in the grip of a swine flu outbreak. Schools, museums and theaters are shut, people have been warned by the government not to kiss or shake hands when they say hello, and around half the people on the street are walking around wearing surgical face masks.
But the swine flu outbreak isn’t just taking its toll on people’s health. Local businesses are also starting to suffer as customers stay away. Watch the video for more.
Over the course of the last three days I have been to five hospitals. Given the local and international media coverage of Mexico’s current flu outbreak, I was expecting to find lines of people, all of them coughing into their government-issued face masks, winding around the block. Not so. Read more on Deborah’s Mexico City blog.
Nairobi based Rob Crilly continues to wrestle with mortality statistics as he battles his way towards a November deadline for his first book on Darfur,
Why does any of this matter? A lot of people have died in Darfur so why get bogged down in numbers? Well, using the wrong number hands Khartoum another excuse to trot out its own underestimate and using inflated figures can push us towards the wrong solutions – overinflated numbers tending to increase the urgency of no fly zones and so on. Still, at least we can agree on the area of Darfur… about the same size as Turkmenistan, right? Read more on Rob’s blog from Kenya.
Meanwhile, please welcome the latest addition to the Frontline blogging stable, the London and Damascus based Sasa, who will be reporting on and from the Syrian capital,
American culture is everywhere in Damascus. This is not North Korea. Walk down any Syrian street and it won’t be long before you come across a shop filled from floor to ceiling with American DVDs – films, documentaries and TV series, all subtitled, all costing pennies, and many available here before they come out in the States. Read more on Sasa’s Syria blog.
These are just three of the highlights from the blogs this past week. We’re adding new bloggers all the time; all journalists, all working in interesting places and all talking about interesting things, so please come and check them out. If you use the popular microblogging tool Twitter, here’s a list of Frontline bloggers who are active on Twitter. For all the latest news from the Frontline Club, the world of foreign correspondents, war reporters, life on the frontline and the job of journalism. Follow @frontlineblog on Twitter.
In fact, if I’m honest, it hasn’t been easy to find those who know people who have died from the new strain of flu or who have relatives suffering from them, which isn’t helped by the fact the the Mexican authorities are refusing to publish a list of the dead.
I did find people affected by the illness of course (hey – come on – I’m a snoop) but, well, given that the swine flu has been labeled a pandemic, there’s no panic in the streets, no riots in the hospitals, and no over-supply of sufferers of their families to speak to.
This afternoon outside the Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Respiratorias (INER), which translates as the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases, there were at least as many journalists as there were patients or family of patients.
INER, I’m told, is Mexico’s major hospital for respiratory diseases. Cameras had been set up on tripods, and TV hosts were waiting around in their suits to do their pieces to camera. I abandoned my hope of making a video piece.
Slightly up the road from camera-land was the emergency room for respiratory diseases, and outside I found Anna Contreras, a 45-year-old housewife, waiting. Her husband Jose Luis Martinez, a 49-year-old driver, has been at the hospital for over and week and had, according to Contreras, been diagnosed with swine flu, or influenza porcina as it is being called here (the name in itself is political).
She said her husband fell ill about a month ago with body aches and a cold.
We thought it was nothing serious so we took him to private doctors who diagnosed him with having tonsillitis or a sore throat, and a third opinion said that he had the beginnings of bronchitis. But instead of improving with the medication they gave him every time he was worse and worse until around 2 weeks ago I was at the end of my tether.
Jose Luis, she says, lost 12 kilos inside of three weeks.
I brought him here [nearly a week ago] and they diagnosed that he had pneumonia due to influenza.
Does she think he has the never-seen-before swine flu?
“Well, he does have it. But I’m calm, in a way, because most of the others who have come here with the same illness and have been here less time have been put on a breathing machine or have died – that hasn’t happened to my husband. He’s stable, he can speak, he hasn’t been put on a breathing machine.
When I asked her if she knew whether many people were dying in the INER she told me,
Many, many, every day. People are dying here every day.
— Deborah Bonello, MexicoReporter.com
]]>It’s bad. With schools closed, as well as cinemas, theaters and museums, sales for some vendors have dropped by as much as 70%. And it doesn’t look like things are going to get better anytime soon. The usual Monday morning traffic crawl was nowhere to be seen this morning, and I arrived at my office door to door in less than 20 minutes.
About half the people walking around on the streets are using masks, around half are risking it.
For a roundup of the Government reaction to the crisis, you can listen to this BBC Wales morning radio show, who got in touch to ask me about what the situation. You can listen to the program here, my interview is about 10 minutes in.
Dispatch to come.
]]>Waking up this morning, I noticed that the death toll attributed to the outbreak had risen since Friday and that the virus – which has also been detected in the United States – is being called a possible pandemic by the WHO. The streets were very quiet for a Saturday morning and the odd person we passed on the way through town in a taxi was wearing the government-issued blue surgical masks to cover their faces to avoid contagion. But there was no panic, no wrestling in the streets for the last face mask, just a sort of eerie quiet – eerie for Mexico City, which is always a seething mass of traffic and people on a Saturday.
So I was surprised to find that a gallery opening in the posh neighbourhood of San Miguel de Chapultepec, part of the city-wide Zona Maco contemporary art festival, was swarming with people. I at least expected to see fashionable versions of the blue face masks being combined with the latest clothes labels, but it wasn’t so. Of the 500 or so attendees at the event (download the details here), perhaps 10 of them were covering their mouths, and some of those had their masks pulled down around their necks.
Risking their lives for art? Well, the new Gabriel Orozco work unveiled at the recently-opened contemporary gallery Kurimanzutto was rather smashing. No one I spoke to felt that the risk of contracting a possibly deadly form of flu was as high as the repercussions of missing out on one of the most trendy dates in the Mexico City art diary.
Annabell Villareal, a 45-year-old business woman at the launch, had rather smartly woven her face mask into her outfit of tight black pants and fitted white jacket, covering her lower face with a white scarf in the style of a bandit rather than a doctor.
"There is a lot of risk – we’re on alert, she said.
"But by taking precautions such as covering the mouth…we can go on existing with other people.
Then it was on to Del Valle, the middle class neighbourhood where I live, after passing through the trendier Condesa on the way. The streets in Condesa were unusually quiet and the restaurants had a lot of empty tables. We went to two major emergency rooms in Del Valle – the IMSS on Gabriel Mancera, and the ISSTE hospital called 20 de Noviembre. Both of them had people their awaiting attention, but nothing like the lines AP was reporting yesterday.
We got a number of taxis during the day, none of the drivers of which reported seeing anything out of the ordinary other than the eerie quiet I mentioned earlier. The theory of one of our drivers was that Mexico’s working classes pay such little attention to health scares and government-issued orders that it is only the dramatic kind of measures being taken by the Government now that spur them into action and taking precautions.
Not only have schools been closed and soccer matches been cancelled, but President Felipe Calderon signed this directive which gives the Government the freedom to implement any measure it sees necessary to prevent, control and combat the virus, and that includes entering private houses and businesses.
The government reaction has definitely caught people’s attention. Let’s just hope that such severe measures prove themselves necessary over the coming days.
Check my mate Daniel Hernandez at his blog Intersectionsfor more on Mexico City today…..
Image: Annabell Villareal, a 45-year-old business woman at the launch, had rather smartly woven her face mask into her outfit of tight black pants and fitted white jacket, covering her lower face with a white scarf in the style of a bandit rather than a doctor. There is a lot of risk – we’re on alert," she said. But by taking precautions such as covering the mouth…we can go on existing with other people. Deborah Bonello for the Los Angeles Times and MexicoReporter.com.
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This car dealership in central Mexico City has a name that almost everyone will recognize.
But don’t accuse the owners of trying to cash in on the popularity of soon-to-be-President Barack Obama. According to showroom staff, the dealership has been called Fiat Obama since 2006, long before Obama’s historic triumph. Why the name? “Obama” is from the name of the shop’s owner, Oñate Baron Mario. Combine the first syllables and you get Obama.
A lucky coincidence, it appears. But could it help move cars off the lot in Mexico, where auto sales are dropping?
See more photos here on Flickr.
Photos: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times
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