Ibero-American News Digest

London on Mexico Swine Flu: No Big Deal

May 11 (EIRNS)—The London Economist, voice of the City of London's Malthusian financiers, isn't worried about swine flu in Mexico. Why did the Calderón government go to all that trouble to protect its citizens, the magazine asks in its May 9 edition, from "what has turned out thus far to be a fairly mild bug?"

While complaining about the "tardiness" with which the government began to test samples, delaying acquisition of the necessary technology for at least a week, the British Empire's mouthpiece quotes public health professor at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM), Laura Moreno Altamirano, who argues that had the samples been analyzed immediately, "they would have known that the virus wasn't so aggressive, and they wouldn't have had to implement all these measures."

A study just completed by the World Health Organization's Pandemic Assessment Collaboration says otherwise, warning that the current swine flu epidemic does have pandemic potential and is likely to be comparable to 20th-Century pandemics, at least in terms of its spread. The study, published in the May 11 edition of Science, supports the decision of the WHO to declare a Phase 5 alert, noting the large number of unknowns related to the virus, particularly its virulence and how it spreads.

The WHO researchers estimated that 23,000 individuals—and possibly as many as 32,000—had been infected in Mexico alone by late April, with a death rate of about 0.4%. Dr. Anne Schuchat, interim deputy director for science and public health programs at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), warned that the 2,618 confirmed cases in the U.S. could be just the tip of the iceberg. Many people who become ill don't seek medical attention, and are never tested for this strain of flu, so "the numbers we are reporting are a minority of the actual infections that are occurring in the country."

Oscar Mujica, an analyst with the Pan American Health Organization, told the Washington Post that had Mexico not taken the measures it did, the virus would have killed 8,605 people and put more than 30,000 in the hospital.

Ibero-American Webcast on Influenza, Globalization

May 8 (EIRNS)—Yesterday's Ibero-American webcast on "Globalization Unleashed the Influenza Pandemic; LaRouche Knows How To Eliminate It," featuring EIR Ibero-American editor Dennis Small, speaking from Virginia, and Jonás Velasco Alonso of the LaRouche Youth Movement in Mexico City, is now archived on EIR's Spanish-language website (www.larouchepub.com/spanish).

The presentation and ensuing discussion drew audiences from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador, keenly interested in tracking down the causes of the international flu outbreak. The webcast demonstrates the underlying causes of the influenza outbreak: first, globalization, and second, the axioms of popular opinion. The program then elaborates on the American System of political and economic thought, represented today as a international political fighting force by Lyndon LaRouche and his youth movement, as contrasted with the oligarchic free-trade outlook which created today's pandemic conditions.