The Times: ‘I had a headache and fever’ says boy who survived
Published in The Times
Ruth Maclean, La Gloria, Mexico
Chris Ayres, Mexico City
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6188732.ece
In the hilltop village of La Gloria in eastern Mexico, Edgar Hernandez is playing amongst the dogs and goats that roam through the streets, seemingly unaware that the swine flu he contracted a few weeks ago—the first known case of the outbreak—has brought his country to a virtual standstill and put the rest of the world on high alert.
“I feel great,” says the five-year-old boy, showing off his hooded top emblazoned with drawings from the animated movie Cars. “But I had a headache and a sore throat and a fever for a while. I had to lay down in bed.”
Edgar’s mother, Maria, 34, tells a rather different story.
“I have very good faith in God, but I was so worried,” she says, adding that her son fell ill after two other children in her village died of pneumonia—cases that were dismissed by the authorities as ‘isolated’ and ‘not related’ and thus went unreported for weeks.
“I put damp towels on his stomach and forehead because of the fever. I couldn’t sleep because I had to be by his side taking care of him all the time.”
It was confirmed on Monday that Edgar is the first known sufferer of swine flu, a revelation that has put the village of La Gloria—and its surrounding factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons’—at the centre of a global race to find how exactly how this new and deadly strain of swine flu emerged. So far it has killed 152 in Mexico and sicked 2,000 others while travelling with remarkable speed around the globe, forcing the World Health Organisation to raise its alert level from phase four, with the maximum being six.
Attention has so far focused on a pork farm named Granjas Carroll de México, which is a 50 per cent owned subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, based in Virginia, in the United States.
Although officials from the WHO have said that it is too early to pinpoint the origins of the virus, residents of La Gloria have been complaining since March that the odour from Granjas Carroll’s pig waste were causing severe respiratory infections. Earlier this month—before anyone had heard of the latest swine flu outbreak—they held a demonstration at which they carried signs of pigs crossed with an X and marked with the word Peligro (danger). Now they say that they live at the “ground zero” of the crisis.
“People say it’s Granjas Carroll’s fault because of the pigs, sometimes there are a lot of flies around but here there aren’t pigs,” said Edgar’s mother. “I can’t say anything because I have no evidence that the farms are responsible. I cannot blame anyone. Not the neighbours or anyone because I don’t know. I have no explanation for the disease that my son had.”
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Others residents of La Gloria are more forthright. José Luis Martínez, 34, said that when he heard about the swine outbreak on television he recognised the symptoms imediately: fever, coughing, aching joints, severe headaches and, in some cases, vomiting and diarrhoea. Several hundred of his fellow villagers had been complaining of exactly those ailments since February.
Said Sr Martínez: “When we saw it on the television, we said to ourselves, ‘This is what we had’,” he said. “It all came from here . . . the symptoms they are suffering are the same that we had here.”
Local health officials and José Córdova, the Health Minister, have downplayed claims that the swine flu epidemic could have started in La Gloria, noting that of 30 mucous samples taken from victims of respiratory diseases there, only one—Edgar’s—came back positive. But now there are calls to exhume the bodies of the children who died of pneumonia so that they can best tested, along with demands by the state legislature of Veracruz that Granjas Carroll release documents about its waste-handling practices.
Smithfield declined to comment on the request, saying that it would not respond to rumours. It has previously said that it has found no clinical signs or symptoms of the presence of swine influenza in its pig herd or in its employees at any of its joint ventures in Mexico. The company – which supplies the McDonald’s and Subway fast-food chains – was fined $12.3 million in 1997 for violating the Clean Water Act, and has long battled environmentalists.
At the National Pork Industry Forum in the US last year, the company’s chief executive, C. Larry Pope, urged delegates to “take bio-security deadly serious”, adding: “We’re in a zero-tolerance world, and it scares me.”
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