On Sullivan Street in the heart of the capital, at least 200 prostitutes closely aligned along three blocks. Look, of course, generous skirts or jeans and blouse to show her navel. Four out of ten use masks. A double line of cars paraded before them to pass homre. Motorists are also protected with masks. The Federal District government has absolute control over business establishments in the city: there is nothing open. Can not go to movies, dinner, drink, dance, listen to live music, doing gymnastics, swimming, bowling, squash. Nothing. All for now is banned, except perhaps the prostitutes, as far as I can see, nobody has to river.
"I do not even know what I came for" says Arlette, 24, originally from Oaxaca, south of the country. "Just go on and brats (boys) that make us lose time. This is dead ... "Speaking of dead, do you know someone who has died from influenza? "This week I learned of three other deaths: a man of 62, who died of kidney failure, a baby boy who hanged himself with the cord of her mother and a woman who died giving birth." Where did this happen? "In the colony where I live on the Northern Prison" (a neighborhood like Lanús). But "nobody influenza."
of stigma and sweets
The H1N1 virus is no longer called pigs after the brutal killing of pigs started in Egypt. As explained over and over again on television experts, is sixty times smaller than a cell and "do not travel more than 50 centimeters when jumping from the nose or mouth of a sick person coughs or sneezes. If we are not close to that person, is unlikely to infect us. The problem begins when thousands of viruses that spread by sneezing person fall on the surface of things: the table, chair, dishes, phone, book, whatever. Because the virus remains alive in contact with air for several hours and if you touch the table, chair, etc., it adheres to the skin of the hand, and then if you put a finger in the nose or mouth, or rub your eyes, then yes it can spread. "
But people do not fully comprehend the true risk of infection is in the hands and not in the air. If so, millions would have already fallen, upside down, like flies. After going through half the city by underground tunnels, locked in a car with several people going up and down at every stop, and could be infected or not, Friday night a young man left the Mixcoac Metro Station - "place of snakes "in Nahuatl, the neighborhood where he was born Octavio Paz, and only then covered her mouth and nose with cloth mask.
Three days earlier, on Tuesday 28, Coyoacan (the equivalent in San Telmo Buenos Aires would), two girls were on a cobbled street, each with a mask, and could not resist the temptation to buy a pistachio ice cream. He then removed the protection and shared the candy with a hickey, dying of laughter. This devotion to the masks, which in reality of little or no use for a half hour soak up saliva and become nanomonstruos-traps to hunt, spawned from the first time a black market and its price jumped from a weight, that cost at the pharmacy, to 7.50 on the street.
But if the economy of panic has also led to hysterical crowds influx of supermarkets, the international repercussions of the crisis have been no less stunning. Knowing that the governments of Argentina and Cuba canceled flights to and from Mexico, as France tried to second, but was rejected by the European Union, the government of Felipe Calderón recommended the City residents not to leave their homes on 1 to 5 May. Many Bogota, neither slow nor lazy, they left the resorts.
And yesterday, Thursday, in Acapulco, the legendary Pacific port, a vehicle with plates of DF was stoned by a group of young people as a sign of repudiation. The worst thing was that, when questioned by the media about the incident, Mayor Manuel Anorve Baths, justified the attack, saying: "All I have nothing to do in Acapulco to go home."
The hotel occupancy nationwide is less than 10 percent, it was learned last night, while in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro, a region famous for its seventeenth-century Franciscan missions, groups of farmers blocked the only road asphalt to stop cars with plates from Mexico City and required to return from whence they came. Under Siege
In DF, from Friday April 24th all campuses were closed "until further notice." Friday's own City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard of the leftist coalition that opposes the government stubbornly conservative Felipe Calderon has ordered the closure of cinemas, theaters, concert halls, museums and libraries, as well as the cancellation of more than 550 outdoor entertainment. On Saturday 25 Sunday was decided that all the football games would be made at the temples closed and held no mass. A new psychological blow came that Sunday afternoon, when the bullring in Aguascalientes, the public drunk and euphoric in the stands, was announced that the race was canceled "by the epidemic that the country is suffering." Fans were told to evacuate the premises quickly, as if an invading army lurking behind the walls.
social panic, already in turmoil, intensified on Monday 27, when the city government ordered the closure of 35 000 restaurants gyms, pools and any sport environment. The restaurateurs protested strongly: "We are losing millions of dollars a day and more than 450 thousand endangered jobs." Ebrard, the mayor, said in anticipation that their government provided for the temporary closure of all lines Metro, Metrobus and minibuses, but added that restaurants could sell or supply food to take home orders. Many businesses, immediately, put boards in front of their gates with attractive offers more suspicious: "Every two for one." The camera of restaurateurs reported that each establishment, on average, had sold three meals a day. A disaster.
The dance of the dead
the late 90s were in Mexico three agencies epidemiologically linked to the issue: the National Institute of Hygiene, National Institute of Virology and Biological Laboratories Reagents and Mexico. The two first is devoted to the known virus in the country and designing ways to combat them. The third surti vaccines, sera, immunoglobulins and diagnostic reagents to government health unit. The three entities formal decision disappeared between 2000 and 2006 and the country was helpless in this matter.
When the first cases of swine flu, and Oaxaca in Mexico City in mid-March, public health institutions were unable to identify them by lack of tools. When the problem has worsened in the second half of April, Mexico clinical samples sent to Canadian laboratories for analysis. That process took until Thursday 23 April.
As the situation could not continue to drive long distances, both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control United States, settled in Mexico City, a highly equipped laboratory to decipher the epidemic. And when it gave its first results on Tuesday, 28, began the dance of the dead. To the end of yesterday afternoon there were 16 cases "fully confirmed" and the credibility of the government, who knew announce twenty, continues to decline.
In a society as politicized as the City, where large sections argue that Calderon won the presidency by electoral fraud in 2006 and began an alleged war on drugs as an excuse to militarize the country and entrench themselves in power, handling information of this outbreak has led to more suspicions than answers, especially since, to the astonishment of the world, the authorities have refused to provide verifiable data on the dead, whose number grows and shrinks at the whim of the Minister of Health.
Source: Journal
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