4-year-old boy at Mexican pig farm may provide clues on swine flu

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/6395793.html

MEXICO CITY -- With the death toll climbing, Mexican authorities at the center of a global flu epidemic struggled Monday to piece together its lethal march as attention focused on a 4-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 Monday. The boy's case provides an important clue of the strain's path.

The boy lived near a pig farm run by a U.S.-Mexican company, Granjas Carroll, in the municipality of Perote, in Veracruz state on the Gulf of Mexico coast. He contracted the disease April 2, Cordova said, and was part of a group of residents who came down with what at the time was labeled a particularly bad case of the flu.

Only one sample from the group, that belonging to the boy, was preserved and re-tested -- only after other cases of the new strain were later confirmed elsewhere, Cordova said. The boy had the same disease. It is unknown how many more of the hundreds of people who fell sick around April 2 in Perote also were infected by the more virulent strain.

In another ominous disclosure, officials said the first confirmed fatality of the disease, from an impoverished state neighboring Veracruz, worked as a door-to-door census-taker and might have had contact with scores of people.

[vaberella]

1. Lordy...So correct me if I'm wrong. The article basically said the virus mutates?!

Or am I wrong?

Not only that...many people are walking around infected or at least there are more people with it that are unreported?!

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Yes and yes

all viruses mutate

and yes that means they change

[Oregone]

4. Not all viruses mutate

Only the ones the intelligent designer asks to. The rest just wait and watch Oprah.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Ok now that makes sense

state of oaxaca, census worker

Yes the IFE has been sending people all over the field

[Princess Turandot]

5. You can see the pig farming area here in Google Maps..

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=19.582192,-97.307539&spn=0.071809,0.116901&z=14

Sheds & waste pools, in the middle of what looks like crop irrigation circles. I think this one is the Granjas Carroll farm, based on the Guardian article referenced in this thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3851532&mesg_id=3851532 . The town where the boy lived, La Gloria, is about 12 miles south of these facilities.

Edited to add: These sheds are around .15 to .20 of a mile long.

[Blue Diadem]

6. So the first person that died was a census taker. That explains

what I watched last night on ABC. They had a reporter in Oaxaca asking questions of her neighbors but found little cooperation and very little information, other than she had held a government job.

[formercia]

7. I wonder what they were feeding the pigs.

Were drug lords supplying fresh meat?

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Lord no viruses do that

Pigs have receptors for human and bird flu... why they can be perfect breeding grounds

It is called genetic shift

Spongiform has another mechanism by the by

[formercia]

9. I was thinking of cadavers infected with influenza or dead fowl.

Pigs will eat anything and some people don't care where the feed comes from.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. No the mixing happens in the lungs

mostly

And yes pigs will eat anything

[formercia]

11. All it takes is a drop of infected tissue fluid inhaled while eating.

Not difficult for a Pig to do. Throw in a few bird carcasses infected with H5N1. What a stew.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. This is something that happens naturally

and there is no report of bird flue in Mexico

Now a bird could have brought it, and pig inhaled droppings

Then there is the timeline for appearance in the US

Point is, this happens

Nothing nefarious here, and part of the coevolution of higher level mammals, in this case humans, and viruses