As swine flu runs rampant in the Southern Hemisphere winter, world health experts are concerned that some hard-hit countries have been reluctant to take forceful measures to protect public health.
Argentina’s new health minister, Juan Manzur, only raised the country’s official death toll to 44 on Friday. He now estimates that as many as 320,000 people have been stricken with influenza, including about 100,000 with swine flu — a huge jump in what the government acknowledged previously, and an indication that Argentina’s hospitals will remain overwhelmed for months.
Britain, for its part, had refused to do widespread testing for swine flu, slowing the WHO’s efforts to declare that the viral spread had become a pandemic. British Health Minister Andy Burnham belatedly acknowledged on Thursday that London needed to revamp its response and could see up to 100,000 new swine flu cases a day by the end of next month.
The government was reluctant to implement unpopular measures leading up to last Sunday’s midterm elections in Argentina. Now that they’re over, it ramped up its response this week — doubling the winter vacation to a month for schools nationwide, sending pregnant women and other vulnerable workers home for 15 days and urging people to avoid crowds whenever possible.
But Argentina still refuses to declare a national public health emergency, despite ranking third in the world for swine flu deaths, behind the US and Mexico.
“An unfortunate situation in Argentina was this mix of elections and a pandemic, which we epidemiologists don’t recommend,” said Mirta Roses, director of the Pan American Health Organization, which has 25 experts working in Argentina.
Mexico, in contrast, deserves the whole world’s thanks for its forceful, costly and very public response, which included a near-total shutdown of the nation’s public life that cost the country US$3.5 billion.
It helped slow the initial spread of the virus and gave other nations more time to prepare, said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍).
“Mexico gave the world an early warning, and it also gave the world a model of rapid and transparent reporting, aggressive control measures, and generous sharing of data and samples,” Chan said on Thursday during a two-day summit of health ministers in Cancun.
Just how effective Mexico’s draconian response was will take some time to determine, because scientists will have to compare what was done with what might have happened had the country done nothing, said Nancy Cox, who leads the influenza division of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“However, they were so courageous to do what they did. It impressed the entire world,” Cox said.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon also faced resistance at home. He said some state officials wanted to hide the numbers for fear it would cause panic, but he overruled them. Mexico’s toll has since risen to 10,687 cases, including 119 deaths.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS