From Xico

Flu in Mexico: Praise for the Mexican Response

Mexico has really handled the crisis extremely well.  Given that we are all human, and nothing we do is perfect, I can't imagine, with the resources Mexico has, that the country could have done better.  Here is a great blog post from LatIntelligence which sums up the feelings of a fair number of people.

Flu in Mexico and California: Best Report on Epidemiological Detective Work

Here in The Wall Street Journal.  Might not have begun in Mexico.  Lots of excellent detective work going on.  Epidemiologist Eduardo Sada is proud of his country.  I am, too.

Flu in Mexico: Unexpected holidays, unexpected loss of wages

My neighbor T and I have just been talking about the fact that almost everything everywhere is closed following the order of the Secretary of Health, José Angel Córdova, to suspend all non-essential work in the productive sector of the economy.  Victims of the flu aren't confined to the sick: wage-earners , both in the formal and informal economies, stand to lose significant earnings. T says it's going to be really hard on the people in the Colonia, and of course it is:  here people live paycheck to paycheck if not day to day.

There is no obligation for bosses to pay, according to Federal Labor Law.  Luis Manuel Guiada, legal advisor to the American Chamber of Commerce and Italo Morales, president of the Labor Commission of Canacintra, a business organization, appealed to "the sensitivities of employers" to pay wages.  What else could they do?

Meanwhile, T is pretty scared.  I imagine other people are, too.  The media are altogether too dramatic about the situation.  Most people don't have access to the internet where one can find all kinds of sensible material.

Flu in Mexico: What's going on in our colonia here in the infamous state of Veracruz

Nothing much.  It's close to normal, though schools are closed and no one is kissing or shaking hands as far as I can tell.  Last night, our young neighbor come over to ask if we happened to have a bocacubierta, mouth cover, because her mother was going to a meeting.  We didn't.  It was necessary for admission to a women's meeting.  It turned out they were available at the meeting.  Today, Blanca and I drove into Coatepec to get the stitches taken out of her puppies belly following spaying (Tati is the cutest puppy around, or at least one of the cutest.)  Blanca said that she thought it was a good idea to wear the mouth covers at the meeting because there were visitors from outside the colonia and it was crowded.  She very clearly understood that they were to keep people from sneezing and coughing on each other much more than to protect the wearers from germs.  She thought all the measures were quite sensible and not a particular burden here because all the local shops and stands can stay open.

Her one complaint was that they'd been given tons of schoolwork to do at home.  One of the projects was to design a product and then to come up with a marketing campaign for it. She squinched her face.  It didn't sound like fun.  I told her I'd seen on Mex Files some pictures of decorated bocacubiertas. Below you can see a couple from the site Guanabee which I found via Mex Files:

 Maybe she could do a set of designer bocacubiertas, we thought.  We suspected she wouldn't be the only one.  In fact, there are already commercial sites.  Fox News offers a quick view of a bunch here.

I kind of like the home-made ones better. 

We both had heard that this weekend was a long one because of a holiday.  She thought the holiday might be the Fiesta of the Three Crosses.  The shrine where this is celebrated is right behind our neighbors house, but there's been no evidence of it being ready for a mass or a party or anything else.  Several activities have, in fact, been suspended, and she thought this might be one of them.

The funny thing is, Jim and I just heard that the holiday officially involved in the long weekend is Cinco de Mayo: the big drinking day in the US.  Here in our colonia, no one seems to pay attention to it.

Anyway, everyone here seems quite aware of the situation, and nobody seems the least bit panicky and no one is walking around with a mask.  Just careful.  And traffic in Coatepec seemed busy, busy, busy as usual.  And no one there was walking around with a mask on.
And no one knows anyone who is sick with flu-like symptoms.  And no one is terribly scared of the flu. Not that there aren't problems: diabetes, for one.  In the past few months, two people in our colonia in their forties died from complications of that disease.

Mexican Flu: Information on

Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) has a very good basic site with information including answers to a lot of frequently asked questions and links to a number of useful sites. The site is in Spanish, but it is not difficult, so if you can read a bit of Spanish you should be able to use it.

Here is a link to a Google Earth map of the world which gives some idea of the outbreak.

Mexican Flu: The NAFTA-Industrial Agriculture Context

Laura Carlsen of Americas Program makes the connections between  industrial agriculture, NAFTA and neoliberal economics, Smithfield Foods, the spread of the virus and why it showed first and with strength in Mexico City here.  Well-documented.

Mexican Flu: The NAFTA-Industrial Agriculture Context

Laura Carlsen of Americas Program makes the connections between  industrial agriculture, NAFTA and neoliberal economics, Smithfield Foods, the spread of the virus and why it showed first and with strength in Mexico City here.  Well-documented.

Mexican Flu: Granjas Carroll: Did It All Start Here?

Stolen from El Universal, picture of pigs at Granjas Carroll.

From El Universal today, my translation.
Transnational pig production under suspicion
By Carlos Macías Richard

Where did the swine flue come from?  It's still not certain, but data is beginning to flow.  One clue leads to Perote, Veracruz.

The current epiemic which has changed the lives of all the inhabitants of the country will certainly bring together many stories and actors, many personal and family dramas which emerged suddenly and incomprehensibly.  However, there are too many threads with which to begin to reconstruct calmly (for the purposes of informing society) the origin and evolution of the epidemic.  The following will be  perhaps a small part of the puzzle which we are beginning to put together.

Smithfield is the most important global  company in the processing of food products derived from pork.  In its prime, it was the first company of its kind to obtain environmental certification ISO 14001, in its  its operations as pork producers and processors.  The company's motto is designed to create confidence:  Good Food Responsibly.

Smithfield had its beginnings in 1936 when Joseph Luter built a small ham and bacon packaging plant in Smithfield, Virginia.  But its current global manifestation dates from 1999 when it acquired its competitor, Carroll's Foods (in order to create Smithfield Foods) and became the rival of the no less omnipresent company Tyson's.

The global company Smithfield is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SFD.. It also appears on NASDAQ .Its stock fell Monday a little more than ten percent in one day when Tyson also fell nine percent.  Remember that it is the practice of investors to buy stock based on rumor and sell based on news.
Smithfield, now owner of Carroll Foods, is the co-owner of granja Carroll, in the valley of Perote.  It's been mentioned a lot that granja Carroll owns the most technologically advanced facilities in the country for raising pork.   The Mexican associates of Smithfield at Granjas Carraoll are not minor businesses either.  They are the stockholders of Agroindustrias Unidas de Mexico, one of the major producers and exporters of Mexican coffee (Veracruz and Chiapas).

Granja Carroll has been continuously challenged by the inhabitants of the adjoining area since at least 2007 because of its inadequate management of wastes.  The most recent expansion of  processing operationswas announced in Veracruz in December, 2007. In October 2008 in order to honor its environmental commitment, Granja Carroll donated to the governor of the state 500,000 pesos to support the campaign called Faithful to the Forests [FidelidadForestal] (in Veracruz, ...the program was commonly called Fidel. [Fidel is the name of the governor].  In January 2008, the governor inaugurated the meat processor and incinerator at Granjas Carroll.

The acute respiratory problems of many inhabitants of the valley of Perote began during the second part of March 2009.  It appears to us a good idea to raise the fundamental questions we all have.

1. The health authorities of Veracruz acted with unaccustomed speed to analyse the results of the condition found among the population (in the town of Las Glorias) at the end of March.  Even more, those same authorities acted with incredible speed to alleviate and eliminate the illness in the population.

T2.  The expert James Wilson (consultant for the US business Veratec which deals with  with biotechnological alerts) appeared also, at an early date....(This doesn't have to do with just any consultant; to understand the importance of Wilson, you should know that he is one of the scientists accustomed to appear before the committee on internal security of the US Congress.) Wilson submitted the lab results on the infectious agent in the population [in Las Glorias] around the 30th of March.  A short time after this investigation in Mexico and in the US, Veratec alerted the World Health Organizaton, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US and the international Red Cross about the outbreak (Veratect did not say whether it alerted the government of Mexico).  Some unsettling questions are: Did Veratec make the government of Veracruz or the national government of Mexico aware of the relevance of this finding?  If not, why not?  Perhaps the analysis of Veratec and Wilson  was ordered and sent only to granja Carroll and not to the government of Veracruz?  Perhaps the results were sought and used mainly by the govrnment, and also for the attention and treatment of the sick?

3. Since from December, 2005 to January, 2009, at least twelve isolated cases of swine flu had appeared in the US according to the CDC,  there are a variety of public health documents on line which warn that the subtype A of H1N1 (swine flu) is notably only sensitive to treatment with sanamivir or oseltamivir and not with the traditional medicines used with that subtype of influenza A (amantadine and rimantadince).

4.  Very probably the owners and global directors of Smithfield, shareholders of granja Carroll, also know the latent public health risk, so... they always have at hand, in the same offices of the Veracruz farm, large quantities of boxes of ten capsules of the miraculous oseltamivir (that is to say, Tamiflú....specifically to provide individual doses of five days every twelve hours). Owing to the same medical experience treating patients in the US, the few patients who appeared in Texas and California at the end of March and beginning of April of this year were treated promptly and recovered.

5.  The population of Las Glorias got sick....and got better at the beginning of April.. The 2nd of April (and making use of some lab results Wilson submitted?) the secretary of health of Veracruz, Manuel Lila de Arce said:  "It is not an epidemic, it is not influenza, the farms were fumigated because while we don't have problems with rodents and insects now, we treat to avoid any proliferation of another illness which strictly speaking is not  this one" (which?) However, he agreed that they ought to establish and maintain for some days a public health fence [I think his means quarantine].  (Perhaps this was sufficient?) The quarantine took place owing to the fact that "about 30 percent of the roughly 2500 inhabitants" had symptoms of respiratory infections."

6.  The state government has indicated that since April 23, among the sick in Las Glorias only one five year old child tested positive for swine flu and that he recuperated withouth problems.  Yet this past weekend, the governor visited the child at his house to show publically that there was no evidence of swine flu in the state.  The 26th of April, Smithfield appeared pressured to put on its global web page that "none of the workers or the animals of granja Carroll had any illness associated with swine flu."

The questions are timely. What medicine did the government give to the child who had swine flu, and what medicine did it give to the rest of the people of Las Glorias presenting respiratory symptoms (resfriado)?  Who recommended to the state government to use this medicine (a medicine so effective, and which was not used with patients with similar symptoms in Oaxaca, Mexico City and San Luis Potois?)  What medicine is this giant, jealous global pig production business accustomed to keep on hand in its medicine cabinet and to offer and administer to its employees in case of emergency?

The answer, probably, is part of a skein of explanations with many threads which will ....which will arrive [as news] at Nasdaq.

Carlos Macías Richard is a full time researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS)

Mexican Flu: Granjas Carroll

Since they've been in the news lately, here's a link to the (in)famous Granjas Carroll.  They have a nice, feel-good webpage which says, among other thing that Granjas Carroll is a "socially responsible business:

Granjas Carroll de Mexico is a Mexican business owned by two companies: Agroinustrias Unidas de Mexico, which has produced and marketed cotton, food oils, coffee and cocoa.  The North American associate, Smithfield, is a world leader in pork production and has factories in France, Spain, Romania, the US and Mexico.

In 1994 we opened our first specialized pig "farm" in the Valley of Perote.  Since then we have built and are operating 16 "farms" with a total of 566,000 [vientres?] on the border between the states of Veracruz and Puebla.

In a sustainable manner, we have consolidated our presence in the domestic market as the principal producer of pigs in Mexico, contributing annually 10% of national pork producton, equal to a million heads.

Makng use of scientific research, available technology, our experience, andinnovation, GCM continually improves its animal husbandry practices resulting in excellent quality meat produced susainably and competitively.

Flu in Mexico: Mexico is handling things well

Excellent commentary from The Mex Files clarifying Mexico's status as a middle-class country with a good public health system and some problems not so different from ummm the US's.  I'd like to mention here that Susan Collins, Republican Senator from Maine, was responsible for stripping funding for pandemic preparedness from the US stimulus bill.  See this article  in The Huffington Post for details.  The article (and I) wonder just how Republicans couldn't have understood that a pandemic might  affect the  economy....let alone that preparation for one would provide jobs.