El Universal, a Mexican periodical, says that "patient zero," the earliest known H1N1 swine flu patient, was a 39-year-old woman from Oaxaca. She was admitted to the Civil Hospital for "acute respiratory distress syndrome "on April 9, and family members said she’d had the symptoms for over a week.
That means she probably probably contracted H1N1 around April 1 or even late March.Very early.
There is no mention of the Oaxaca woman having contact with the Smithfield CAFO. Indeed, Oaxaca is roughly a 4.5 hour drive over the mighty Sierra Made mountain range from the Smithfield CAFO.
This actually bolsters my own theory that there may be more than one illness at work in the Mexico outbreak. Keep in mind that there have actually been very few confirmed cases of H1N1. Mexico has only 2 labs in which to confirm H1N1, and the hospitals are overwhelmed, so the suspected death count and suspected case count are probably total guesses at this point. Now throw in a CAFO that is spewing flu-like disorders and pneumopnia into the mix, how can even a trained doctor tell what she’s seeing without rapid lab confirmations?
More on this, as it develops.
UPDATE: I just want to clarify that the Oaxaca woman seems to have been infected earlier, because I haven’t seen convincing timing on when the La Gloria boy contracted the disease (versus when he was admitted to the hospital).
UPDATE: From the Seattle PI:
If she was a census taker across that region, south of Mexico City, that might explain why we have two simultaneous "patients zero" who are seemingly so far apart, one in Veracruz and the other in Oaxaca.
As of now the earliest confirmed case of H1N1 is in La Gloria. There is substantial evidence linking Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) with the formation virulent disease. These sites are basically incubators with the ideal conditions for new mutant disease variants to spread: immune-inhibited animals, close proximity to additional hosts, policies that ensure animal feces is widely dispersed to infect these hosts, pits of contagion perfect as a breeding ground for the new disease and clear evidence of ground water contagion that allow the mutant variants access to human populations (if they didn’t first affect CAFO employees).
I encourage your readers to look at the list of publications cited at Nature Network (part of the science journal Nature’s online community). See the article Priming the Pump of a Swine Flu Pandemic for a detailed analysis of the current situation. Whether or not Smithfield’s Mexican subsidiary is the source of this current outbreak (and there’s good reason to suspect they are) we are creating the conditions for a new era of global pandemics. Avian flu and swine flu have only killed a few hundred people so far. We may not be so lucky in the future.
Thanks for the information, Eric, and thanks for creating a profile!
The piece you cite (and wrote??) is well written and erudite — but it doesn’t address the specifics of a flu outbreak. Here are my questions to you, and I’m honestly seeking answers, not trying to be a jerk:
1) When was the La Gloria boy infected? People say he was the earliest, but I haven’t seen a date. I want to know how much earlier Hernandez was infected than the 39-year-old Oaxaca woman. If they were virtually simultaneous, and the Oaxaca woman had no contact with the farm or folks from La Glora, that poses a real problem for the Smithfield Cafo theory.
2) Flu is spread through inhalation. How did the La Gloria boy inhale flu from an infected pig (let’s call the pig "patient minus one")? Saying there were noxious fumes from the manure lagoon doesn’t cut it. If you read Ghost Map, then you know that’s mideval thinking.
Hernandez needed direct contact with patient minus one to be a true "patient zero." Otherwise there are more questions to answer.
For example, I remain dubious about the "cloud of flies" vector theory that Tom Philpott has put forward — dubious that (a) flies can actually infect humans with a virus that needs to be aerosolized in some way (like a sneeze) to spread in people and (b) that ANY swine flu, specifically, can be carried in this way. Philpott’s done some great research, and it certainly seems worthy of pursuit. But I guess I remain unconvinced because there are CAFO manure lagoons all over the planet, and the flu-like symptoms described by residents near the SMithfield CAFO are the same described by residents near CAFOs in America. Why hasn’t it happened a thousand times before? Furthermore, until lab results come back confirming more H1N1 cases in La Gloria, forming a chain from the Hernandez boy to the farm, we won’t be able to separate CAFO-induced respiratory disorders from H1N1-induced respiratory disorders.
Finally, my fear is that people are missing the real tragedy, here: The noxious gas-spewing "farm" posed a catastrophic public health hazard to the towns surrounding it, H1N1 outbreak or no. I hope that, if no connection is proved, investigators don’t lose sight of that.