Mexico's Mystery: Why Is Swine Flu Deadlier There?

By Sarah Williams

The swine-flu virus continued its gradual global march on Tuesday, prompting countries to strengthen efforts to stem its spread, while President Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.5 billion in supplementary spending to prepare for a possible swine-flu pandemic and installed the newly confirmed Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, to help lead the fight against the disease. In the U.S., the caseload rose to 67 across five states — 45 of them in New York City, where health officials are investigating two new possible outbreaks at city schools — with more virus samples awaiting laboratory confirmation. New Zealand and Israel confirmed their first cases, while Canada, the U.K. and Spain saw small upticks in their swine-flu caseloads.

Several countries tightened border controls and discouraged travel to affected areas — Cuba suspended all flights to and from Mexico — but the World Health Organization kept the pandemic alert level at Phase 4, still two phases below a full pandemic. Outside Mexico, the apparent epicenter of the A/H1N1 virus, there have been no deaths confirmed from the flu and relatively few hospitalizations, and health officials continued to preach the need for a calm response. "What we see in the United States, or have been seeing so far, has been milder," said Richard Besser, the acting director for the Centers for Disease Control.

But health officials also cautioned that the U.S. caseload, including fatalities, would rise, with ongoing surveillance. "We expect to see more cases and we expect to report on them," says Besser. "As this moves forward, I fully expect that we will see deaths from this infection."

Still, Mexico seems to be experiencing a very different — and much scarier — outbreak than the rest of the world. More than 2,000 suspected swine-flu cases have been reported in several Mexican states, with more than 150 deaths. Those numbers are still preliminary and are expected to rise as blood samples from Mexican patients continue to be tested for the A/H1N1 swine-flu virus. Lack of laboratory capacity to run the time-consuming blood tests has so far held up the confirmation of cases there.

On Tuesday the government of Mexico City ordered gyms, discos, theaters and all sit-down restaurants (excluding those that serve only take-out) closed until at least May 6, in an effort to limit public gatherings and the spread of the virus. As epidemiologists swarm the country in an effort to trace the virus's spread, the big question remains: Why is the disease seemingly so much more deadly in Mexico than anywhere else? "This will be the object of a great deal of research and attention," said Keiji Fukuda, the interim director-general for health, safety and environment for the World Health Organization (WHO). "But we can't say why there seems to be a difference."

The WHO will convene an expert panel on April 29 to attempt to answer that question, but one way to begin is to look at where the virus originated. Epidemiologists appear to be homing in on a possible ground zero in the Mexican Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, in a town called Perote, which is home to a large pig farm owned by the U.S. company Smithfield Foods. Flu-like cases began popping up there in early April, before the first confirmed case in Mexico on April 13.

But the truth is that even though the virus is referred to as swine flu, researchers do not yet know for sure that the A/H1N1 virus actually originated in pigs. There's been no evidence yet of pigs getting sick in either Mexico or the U.S. (Despite several countries' bans on pork imports, it's important to remember that the disease cannot be contracted by eating pork.) The original reservoir for flu viruses is actually wild birds, which can spread infection to domestic birds and people — as we saw with the H5N1 avian flu in Asia — and to pigs. Pigs make particularly good biological mixing bowls since they can be infected by bird-, swine- and human-flu viruses and provide a hospitable environment for the viruses to swap genes and create entirely new strains in a process called reassortment. That is what may have happened with the A/H1N1 swine-flu virus, which contains genes from bird-, pig- and human-flu viruses. "When you get a large concentration of pig farms, people, wild birds and poultry, these things do happen," says Peter Daszak, the president of the Wildlife Trust and an expert on emerging diseases.

In recent years, since the ongoing H5N1 bird-flu virus first surfaced, health officials have focused mostly on Asia as the breeding ground for the world's next pandemic flu virus. But Daszak points out that Mexico, where people, pigs and poultry can exist in close proximity, is an overlooked hot spot for new viruses. Given the booming global livestock trade — more than 1.5 billion live animals have been shipped to the U.S. from all over the world in the past decade — it's possible that the A/H1N1 virus originated in an Asian bird that was exported to Mexico, where it may have reassorted in a pig before infecting people. Far more investigation is still needed, but it's clear that while U.S. officials were looking for flu exports from Asia, they should have also improved surveillance of their southern neighbor. "I think it might have been possible to prevent it," says Daszak. "We should be paying more attention to our own backyard."

Now that the swine-flu virus seems well established in human beings, containment is no longer an option. The public health response must be to slow the spread, which means getting a better handle on the virus. While the difference in severity between Mexico and U.S. cases would suggest that there are different viruses affecting the two countries, researchers have genetically sequenced swine-flu viruses from both Mexican and American victims, and "we see no difference in the viruses infecting sick people and less-sick people," said Fukuda. And even if there were genetic differences, it wouldn't necessarily mean much — scientists still don't know exactly which genes do what on flu viruses.

The Mexican deaths may also be attributable to some underlying coinfection or health problem that is simply not present in the U.S. cases — but that will require more investigation to uncover.

It's also possible that A/H1N1 began life in Mexico especially virulent — that country has apparently been grappling with the virus for weeks longer than the U.S. has — and evolved to become less dangerous by the time it crossed the border. That would not be an unusual evolutionary device, since viruses that are too deadly cannot survive if they kill off their host before being given a chance to spread. "It's fairly common in epidemics to see a trade-off between the ability to cause severe death and transmissibility," says Steven Kleiboeker, a virologist and the chief scientific officer for ViraCor Laboratories. The A/H1N1 virus may be attenuating itself as it spreads from person to person, becoming easier to catch but less dangerous.

The WHO, however, says that so far the virus appears to have stayed relatively stable during the chains of transmission, so it may not be mutating much. Still, the virus's current relatively weak state does not guarantee that it won't return later, much more virulent — which is exactly what happened in the 1918 flu pandemic that killed at least 50 million people worldwide. As the flu season comes to an end in the northern hemisphere, it may lead to a natural petering out of new swine-flu cases in the U.S. But the strain may continue to circulate aggressively in the southern hemisphere, which is just now entering its flu season, and then return to the north next winter.

Any conclusions now will be premature, because we still don't know what we're looking at. Experts predict we'll eventually begin to see fewer new cases in Mexico, as lab results separate real swine-flu infections from normal respiratory disease. Meanwhile, the anticipation of more cases and deaths in the U.S. has already been begun to be borne out. As the CDC's Besser himself has pointed out, swine flu is going to be a marathon, not a sprint — and we've only just gotten started.

Indus Valley code is cracked

By Raja Murthy

A 4,500-year-old mystery has been revived, with Indian-American scientists claiming on April 23 that the puzzling symbols that were found on Indus Valley seals are indeed the written script of a language from an ancient civilization.

But skeptics, such as historian Steve Farmer and Harvard University Indologist Michael Witzel, say that claims of the Indus Valley civilization having a written language, and therefore a literate culture, are generally created by pseudo-nationalists from India, Hindu chauvinists and right-wing political frauds who wish to glorify the existence of an ancient Hindu civilization.

The civilization on the banks of the 2,900-kilometer long Indus, one of the world's great rivers with a water volume twice that of the Nile, is said to have flourished between 2600 BC to 1900 BC.

Unlike its river valley contemporaries in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, very little is known about the Indus Valley civilization, largely because its "script" is yet to be deciphered, even though ruins were excavated 130 years ago.

There appears little doubt that a reasonably advanced civilization thrived in the Indus Valley before mysteriously vanishing. But for the past decade, scholars and scientists worldwide have argued whether engravings found on hundreds of Indus Valley objects, such as seals and tablets, are a mysterious script of a language - like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics - or whether they are merely non-lingual signs or pictograms.

On April 23, the US-based Science journal published a paper by an Indian and Indian-American team of scientists and researchers that claimed patterns of symbols found on Indus objects had the definitive linguistic pattern found in written languages. Such a pattern is different from non-linguistic signs.

The paper, titled "'Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script”, featured the findings of Indian-born researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai.

It claims computer analysis revealed comparative "entropic evidence" that Indus signs have a linguistic order similar to some of the world's oldest languages, such as Sumerian from Mesopotamia, classical Tamil and Sanskrit from the Indian sub-continent.

Comparative entropy involves a mathematical process by which an unknown variable can be theoretically determined using known related variables. In this case, researchers say they used computer analysis to compare the pattern of Indus symbols with the patterns of known spoken and mathematical languages. This is the first time that such a process has been used to determine whether unknown symbols are the written script of a language.

"The findings provide quantitative evidence suggesting that the people of the 4,500-year-old Indus civilization may have used writing to represent linguistic content," said project leader Rajesh Rao, a computer scientist at the University of Washington.

"If this is indeed true," Rao told Asia Times Online, "then deciphering the script would provide us with unique insights into the lives and culture of the Indus people."

The 130-year-old excavations in the Indus Valley, covering areas in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, have revealed evidence of an urban civilization. Ruins of excavated Indus Valley cities such as Mohenjadaro and Harappa have revealed elaborate urban infrastructure such as well-planned streets, brick houses, sophisticated drainage and water-storage systems, trading, use of weights, jewelry, knowledge of metallurgy and tool-making. Archaeologists say many more Indus Valley cities are yet to be excavated.

The problem is that any new "path-breaking" Indus Valley research findings have to pass credibility tests. The Indus Valley puzzle took a more crooked dimension in the past decade. India's right-wing political outfits that grew in this period, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have been known to make clumsy, ridiculously amateurish attempts to "rewrite" over 5,000 years of Indian history.

Such fake coloring of authentic Indian and Hindu religious history was to feed a narrow-minded sectarian, political and chauvinistic agenda. The BJP has denied such history-faking tricks. But a senior BJP worker in Kolkata, an art critic by profession, told this correspondent in 2003 that he was engaged in rewriting history textbooks. The BJP was then heading India's central government.

This history tomfoolery included attempts to portray the Indus Valley culture as a Hindu civilization. Some fraudsters have even produced fake Indus seals as "proof" of an advanced society with rich, as yet undiscovered, literature.

But the genuine Indus symbols are merely simple non-linguistic signs common in the ancient world, according to a controversial paper in 2004 titled "The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization". The paper was written by comparative historian Steve Farmer; Richard Sproat, a biomedical computer scientist at the Oregon Health and Science University, Portland; and Michael Witzel, an Indologist from the Department of Sanskrit and Indian studies at Harvard University.

Five years later, in 2009, Rajesh Rao and his colleagues' year-long study claimed to have debunked the debunkers Farmer, Sproat and Witzel. The California-based Packard Foundation and Mumbai-based Sir Jamsetji Tata Trust sponsored the project. The global media reported on Rao's April 23 Science Journal paper supporting claims that the Indus symbols are the written script of an ancient language.

However, the original Indus script debunkers refuse to be debunked. In a quick counter response dated April 24, Farmer and Co rubbished the Washington University study. Their two-page answer was cheekily titled, "A Refutation of the Claimed Refutation of the Nonlinguistic Nature of Indus Symbols: Invented Data Sets in the Statistical Paper of Rao et al. (Science, 2009)". Farmer and Co argued that Rao and Co had compared the Indus sign sets with "artificial sets of random and ordered signs”.

They said the Rao study proved nothing that is not known - that is, "the Indus sign system has some kind of rough structure, which has been known since the 1920s”, said their rejoinder.

"Indus Valley texts are cryptic to extremes, and the script shows few signs of evolutionary change," Farmer and Witzel wrote in October 2000. "Most [Indus] inscriptions are no more than four or five characters long; many contain only two or three characters. Moreover, character shapes in mature Harappa appear to be strangely 'frozen', unlike anything seen in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia or China."

The left-leaning Indian news magazine Frontline carried Farmer's and Witzel's article in a cover story titled "Horseplay in Harappa - In the 'Piltdown Horse' hoax, Hindutva propagandists make a little Sanskrit go a long way”. The article debunked sensational claims in 1999 that the Indus script had been "deciphered" by N S Rajaram and Natwar Jha.

The motive of this fraud was to prove that the Indus civilization was an early Hindu civilization. As proof, Rajaram and Jha produced an Indus Valley "horse" seal as evidence that the Indus people used horses, an animal commonly mentioned in the Vedas, the ancient Indian texts dating to the 2nd millennium BC - over 2,000 years later than the earliest dated Indus Valley seals. But no images of horses were found in the Indus Valley excavations, until Rajaram and Jha produced their horse seal.

Farmer and Witzel proved that the horse seal was a fraudulent computerized distortion of a broken "unicorn bull" seal. The fake horse seal was derided as the "Piltdown Horse", an imaginary creation to fill the gap between the Harappan and Vedic cultures, just as the famous "Piltdown Man" did in 1912. That year, skeletal remains of the "missing link" between ape and man were "discovered" in Piltdown, a village in England. They were later found to be fake.

In their April 23 paper, Rao's team said they compared statistical patterns in sequences of Indus symbols with sequences in known ancient and modern spoken languages, computer language and natural sequences such as in human DNA.

While Farmer and Co claim in their April 24 rebuttal that Rao's team used limited and artificial comparative language tools, Rao's team says the comparative computer analysis included:

1,548 lines of Indus text and 7,000 signs, from veteran Indus scholar Iravatham Mahadevan's 1977 compilation from the Archaeology Society of India.

20,000 sentences from The Brown University Present Day Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English - a well-known dataset compiled from a wide range of texts including press reports, editorials, books, magazines, novels, scientific articles and short stories.

100 Sanskrit hymns from Book 1 of the Rig Veda, said to be composed between 1700-1100 BC.

"Ettuthokai", or "Eight Texts", anthologies of poems in classical Tamil from the Sangam Era, circa 300 BC to 300 AD.

Sumerian - nearly 400 literary compositions dated between 3 BC and 2 BC.

DNA - first one million nucleotides in the human chromosome 2, obtained from the Human Genome Project.

Protein - the entire collection of amino acid sequences from the Bacteria Escherichia Coli, more famous as E coli.

Programming Language - 28,594 lines of code from FORTRAN.

Both camps are adamant they are right. But both could be wrong, given how vested interests and human egos often stubbornly cling to inaccurate views by seeing what they want to see, instead of reality as it is.

If the Indus Valley has an equivalent to the sensational 18th-century discovery of the Rosetta Stone, considered one of the greatest-ever historical finds, that would indeed confirm whether the Indus symbols are a written language - one possibly opening the doorway to an unknown civilization. An officer in Napoleon Bonaparte's invading French army, Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard, found a grey-pinkish granite stone in an Egyptian village called Rosetta on July 15, 1799.

Dating to 196 BC and displayed in the British Museum since 1802, the Rosetta plaque carried a royal decree in Egyptian and Greek in three scripts - Hieroglyphic, Demotic Egyptian and Greek. Since Greek was a known language, stunned scholars could use the translation to decipher the 3,500-year-old hieroglyphics. The doorway to ancient Egypt was opened to the modern world.

Even if the Indus Valley symbols are indeed a written script, there is little chance of deciphering them unless a Rosettta Stone equivalent is available. Archaeologists from India and Pakistan continue to work at Indus Valley sites, unearthing new discoveries each year.

The global politics of swine flu

By M H Ahssan

We may be at the incipient stage of swine flu's deadly spread across the globe, but already signs of new trans-Atlantic fissures over the European Union's (EU) travel advisory to the United States and Mexico as well as airport screening of US travelers can be found aplenty. This puts a premium on what United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon has called for in response to this virus, namely, international solidarity.

Mexican health officials suspect that the swine flu outbreak has caused more than 159 deaths and roughly 2,500 illnesses in the country where the it first emerged.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says at least 105 cases have been confirmed worldwide, including 64 in the United States; six in Canada; three in New Zealand; and two each in Spain, the United Kingdom and Israel. On Monday the WHO raised its alert level from three to four on a six-level scale. This means the virus is thought to be capable of significant human-to-human transmission - a step toward a pandemic.

Swine flu is a contagious respiratory disease that usually affects pigs. It is caused by a type-A influenza virus. The current strain is a new variation of an H1N1 virus, which is a mix of human and animal versions.

"Hysterical", "unwarranted", "overreaction" and "ineffective", were the top choices of words used by US officials in reaction to the EU health officials' alarm bells discouraging "all non-essential travel" to the US.

History often repeats itself, albeit in unexpected fashion, and the stern US responses to the Europeans' health disaster response reminds one of China's similar response when, in April 2003, the US Center on Disease Control (CDC), put this statement on its website in response to the early reports of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in Asia: "Don't go to mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Hanoi unless you really have to."

In historical retrospective, given the eventual semi-global spread of SARS and its limited impact on the US, the CDC travel advisory in 2003 appears entirely timely and appropriate, irrespective of negative reactions by the Chinese government, which was accused by Western governments and world health officials of "deception" about the extent of the deadly disease.

Still, US experts such as Michael T Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, have described some countries' travel warnings and bans on some imported foods from the United States and Mexico as "hysterical".

But with the medical community still in a frantic search to understand this new strain of influenza virus and its potential for "new sub-systems" via mutations and "reassortments", the US government may have under-reacted, given President Barack Obama's assurance on Monday that the swine flu was a cause for concern but "not alarm".

As a result, unlike president George W Bush, who in April 2003 signed Executive Order 12452 adding SARS to the list of communicable diseases, for which the US government can quarantine individuals, forcibly if necessary, Obama has refrained from taking a similar initiative. As a result of which, voluntary self-isolation and "social distancing" on the part of flu victims has for now replaced a robust and systemic prevention through mandatory quarantine systems, epidemical check-points and surveillance mechanisms.

In the event the flu's growth in the US in the coming days and weeks leaps in the less than sanguine direction of a full epidemic, instead of a small-scale one as is the case at the moment, then inevitably questions may arise as to what the Obama administration could have done to stem the tide - other than by simply issuing a travel advisory for Mexico.

Hundreds of US flights to and from Mexico have continued unabated since the swine flu outbreak, and there has not been any attempt by the US government to either close some borders with Mexico or even reduce the substantial human traffic crossing those borders, fearing the adverse economic impacts in today's climate of global economic recession.

This may turn out to be short-sighted if, indeed, the ominous forecasts of potential trans-border transmission of the disease are realized, as any belated US effort would be a remedy too late.

The trick is undoubtedly not to make policies based on worst-case scenarios, but then again there is also the grave risk of avoiding a painful "great reshuffling" of policies called for by a potential pandemic, to paraphrase Andrew Nikforuk in his book, Pandemonium.

"A severe pandemic might encourage us to rethink the deadly pace of globalization and biological trade in all living things," wrote Nikforuk, wise thoughts that sound fresh several years later as the world grapples with the looming specter of a new natural disaster that has already wrought havoc on the failing state of Mexico.

The country has been mired in an uncontrolled war on drug cartels, and the latest setback promises to make Mexico even a more unstable country as the country loses some of its precious resources in fighting a disease. Clearly, Third World Mexico's lack of an integrated strategy to combat the infectious disease with adequate resources has a lot to do with the flu's high mortality rate compared to its impact in US and Canada.

As usual, the North-South gaps reveal themselves with glaring and oppressive clarity in such outbreaks of public illness.

At the same time, by posing the US as a "risk society", a whole new fertile field of discourse on America's (health) identity has been opened by the threat of swine flu, given the stigma of Europe's travel advisory and some European nations' bans on the import of US pork.

An imagined pandemic may sting the US nearly as much as a real pandemic and the sheer indeterminacy of the flu's potency and future growth simply adds to its dispensation of a new unhealthy image for the US. Swine flu points at the growing linkage between foreign policy and health policy, as well as the nexus between health and security, seeing how prominent a role the US Homeland Security plays nowadays in the government's reaction to the unexpected flu epidemic, reflecting a further medicalization of US security.

At the epistemological and policy levels then, in addition to providing a new venue for global health partnership and multilateralism, the obverse side of cooperative behavior is, as stated above, a new rise of national protectionism that is also at the nodal points of North-South divide. This is as we witness the huge disparities and fluctuations in access to preventive medicine in less developed countries, which are keenly concerned about a lack of adequate health financing.

The disease's proliferation in Africa would be especially devastating as the continent is still struggling with the exorbitant ramifications of other infectious diseases. Irrespective of such a scenario, the mere threat of this new disease will escalate the demands of developing and least-developed nations for greater access to vaccine-manufacturing plants, affordable medicine, etc.

Much depends on the scope of the swine flu's global spread and its lethal punch and. Should it turn out that we are merely witnessing its first phase of attack, which is pregnant with multiple subsequent waves causing greater and greater disruptions in world trade, transport and trans-border human movement, something impossible to pre-calculate at this stage, then a whole new logic of de-globalization may be inevitable.

On the other hand, this flu has the potential to be labeled as a "metropolis disease" that does not contaminate much of the the Third World, in which case it will lead to new theorizing about what is referred to these days as the "global network society".

On the whole, swine flu can take one of two directions, it can either act as a circuit-breaker for a renewed globalization in terms of collective response, or a potent source of "international solidarity" as envisioned by UN chief Ban. Or, finally, it may have the contradictory effect of pushing both chariots simultaneously, at least in the short run.

The global politics of swine flu

By M H Ahssan

We may be at the incipient stage of swine flu's deadly spread across the globe, but already signs of new trans-Atlantic fissures over the European Union's (EU) travel advisory to the United States and Mexico as well as airport screening of US travelers can be found aplenty. This puts a premium on what United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon has called for in response to this virus, namely, international solidarity.

Mexican health officials suspect that the swine flu outbreak has caused more than 159 deaths and roughly 2,500 illnesses in the country where the it first emerged.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says at least 105 cases have been confirmed worldwide, including 64 in the United States; six in Canada; three in New Zealand; and two each in Spain, the United Kingdom and Israel. On Monday the WHO raised its alert level from three to four on a six-level scale. This means the virus is thought to be capable of significant human-to-human transmission - a step toward a pandemic.

Swine flu is a contagious respiratory disease that usually affects pigs. It is caused by a type-A influenza virus. The current strain is a new variation of an H1N1 virus, which is a mix of human and animal versions.

"Hysterical", "unwarranted", "overreaction" and "ineffective", were the top choices of words used by US officials in reaction to the EU health officials' alarm bells discouraging "all non-essential travel" to the US.

History often repeats itself, albeit in unexpected fashion, and the stern US responses to the Europeans' health disaster response reminds one of China's similar response when, in April 2003, the US Center on Disease Control (CDC), put this statement on its website in response to the early reports of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in Asia: "Don't go to mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Hanoi unless you really have to."

In historical retrospective, given the eventual semi-global spread of SARS and its limited impact on the US, the CDC travel advisory in 2003 appears entirely timely and appropriate, irrespective of negative reactions by the Chinese government, which was accused by Western governments and world health officials of "deception" about the extent of the deadly disease.

Still, US experts such as Michael T Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, have described some countries' travel warnings and bans on some imported foods from the United States and Mexico as "hysterical".

But with the medical community still in a frantic search to understand this new strain of influenza virus and its potential for "new sub-systems" via mutations and "reassortments", the US government may have under-reacted, given President Barack Obama's assurance on Monday that the swine flu was a cause for concern but "not alarm".

As a result, unlike president George W Bush, who in April 2003 signed Executive Order 12452 adding SARS to the list of communicable diseases, for which the US government can quarantine individuals, forcibly if necessary, Obama has refrained from taking a similar initiative. As a result of which, voluntary self-isolation and "social distancing" on the part of flu victims has for now replaced a robust and systemic prevention through mandatory quarantine systems, epidemical check-points and surveillance mechanisms.

In the event the flu's growth in the US in the coming days and weeks leaps in the less than sanguine direction of a full epidemic, instead of a small-scale one as is the case at the moment, then inevitably questions may arise as to what the Obama administration could have done to stem the tide - other than by simply issuing a travel advisory for Mexico.

Hundreds of US flights to and from Mexico have continued unabated since the swine flu outbreak, and there has not been any attempt by the US government to either close some borders with Mexico or even reduce the substantial human traffic crossing those borders, fearing the adverse economic impacts in today's climate of global economic recession.

This may turn out to be short-sighted if, indeed, the ominous forecasts of potential trans-border transmission of the disease are realized, as any belated US effort would be a remedy too late.

The trick is undoubtedly not to make policies based on worst-case scenarios, but then again there is also the grave risk of avoiding a painful "great reshuffling" of policies called for by a potential pandemic, to paraphrase Andrew Nikforuk in his book, Pandemonium.

"A severe pandemic might encourage us to rethink the deadly pace of globalization and biological trade in all living things," wrote Nikforuk, wise thoughts that sound fresh several years later as the world grapples with the looming specter of a new natural disaster that has already wrought havoc on the failing state of Mexico.

The country has been mired in an uncontrolled war on drug cartels, and the latest setback promises to make Mexico even a more unstable country as the country loses some of its precious resources in fighting a disease. Clearly, Third World Mexico's lack of an integrated strategy to combat the infectious disease with adequate resources has a lot to do with the flu's high mortality rate compared to its impact in US and Canada.

As usual, the North-South gaps reveal themselves with glaring and oppressive clarity in such outbreaks of public illness.

At the same time, by posing the US as a "risk society", a whole new fertile field of discourse on America's (health) identity has been opened by the threat of swine flu, given the stigma of Europe's travel advisory and some European nations' bans on the import of US pork.

An imagined pandemic may sting the US nearly as much as a real pandemic and the sheer indeterminacy of the flu's potency and future growth simply adds to its dispensation of a new unhealthy image for the US. Swine flu points at the growing linkage between foreign policy and health policy, as well as the nexus between health and security, seeing how prominent a role the US Homeland Security plays nowadays in the government's reaction to the unexpected flu epidemic, reflecting a further medicalization of US security.

At the epistemological and policy levels then, in addition to providing a new venue for global health partnership and multilateralism, the obverse side of cooperative behavior is, as stated above, a new rise of national protectionism that is also at the nodal points of North-South divide. This is as we witness the huge disparities and fluctuations in access to preventive medicine in less developed countries, which are keenly concerned about a lack of adequate health financing.

The disease's proliferation in Africa would be especially devastating as the continent is still struggling with the exorbitant ramifications of other infectious diseases. Irrespective of such a scenario, the mere threat of this new disease will escalate the demands of developing and least-developed nations for greater access to vaccine-manufacturing plants, affordable medicine, etc.

Much depends on the scope of the swine flu's global spread and its lethal punch and. Should it turn out that we are merely witnessing its first phase of attack, which is pregnant with multiple subsequent waves causing greater and greater disruptions in world trade, transport and trans-border human movement, something impossible to pre-calculate at this stage, then a whole new logic of de-globalization may be inevitable.

On the other hand, this flu has the potential to be labeled as a "metropolis disease" that does not contaminate much of the the Third World, in which case it will lead to new theorizing about what is referred to these days as the "global network society".

On the whole, swine flu can take one of two directions, it can either act as a circuit-breaker for a renewed globalization in terms of collective response, or a potent source of "international solidarity" as envisioned by UN chief Ban. Or, finally, it may have the contradictory effect of pushing both chariots simultaneously, at least in the short run.

INDIA IS ON HIGH ALERT AS 'SWINE VIRUS' ENTERS

By HNN Special Team

An alarm bells sounds in India as the Swine Influenza Virus enters India, according to confirmed sources. All the major travelling organizations kept on 'high alert' to curb this virus. Ministry of Health issued a clear notices to all the tourists places to take the necessary precautionary measures for this virus or report to the concerned state government departments for necessary action. India is putting systems in place to check the entry of swine flu into the country. A round the clock medical surveillance began at the Delhi and Mumbai international airports on Tuesday night.

Medical teams are at the immigration counters. Those found to be ill will be immediately quarantined. The Union Health Ministry has decided to upgrade medical facilities at the Indira Gandhi International Airport. 32 doctors and eight nurses have been deputed.

According to the health ministry:

- A team of doctors and trained medical staff will be on standby at all the 9 airports
- Temporary quarantine areas are being set up inside the terminals where any suspect case can be isolated
- Along with the 24x7 call centres, they will take out ads in papers asking people to report any symptoms
- In the Mumbai airport too, all passengers from US, Canada, UK and France flying Delta, Continental, Air France and Air India are being screened.

Airline authorities are giving questionaires to passengers before they alight from the aircraft. They will need to fill in all their latest medical details.

The deadly swine flu virus first detected in Mexico can no longer be contained says the WHO.

The US has declared a public health emergency to deal with the emerging swine flu.

After Mexico, the United States is the worst affected with over 60 cases and 45 of them are from New York city. Hundreds of students of one school have fallen ill. They had visited Mexico during their spring break. However, city authorities have said it is not confirmed if it is swine flu.

In India the biggest challenge for the government right now is going to be preventing and tracking potential cases of swine flu entering the country through ports or international airports etc. But with lakhs of passengers coming into the country everyday screening each and everyone of them is going to be quite a challenge.

And here's a look at the countries where the flu has spread:

- Mexico
- United States
- Canada
- The UK
- Spain
- Israel
- New Zealand

Suspected cases have also been reported in Brazil, Guatemala, Peru, Australia, and South Korea, and seven EU states. The flu is obviously worrying more and more Governments and health officials around the world.

A menu for the new Government in India

By Salman Haider

India has emerged and stands tall. Major countries of the world seek to be its partner and room has been made for it at global high tables, like the G-20. But while its role has enlarged, its voice remains muffled. Foreign policy has become predictable, reactive, low key. A more assured and assertive India needs to be rediscovered.

The first requirement, then, is a vision of where the country sees itself and where it is going. Foreign policy principles and priorities need updating and effective projection. This is no easy task: the essential ideas must come from the top and bear the stamp of the leader.

India must make a difference when it comes to the great issues of today: the environment and climate change are now centre stage; nuclear disarmament is beginning to claim major attention. A sluggish India has become a target for activists in these fields. It needs to throw up more ideas and take fresh initiatives.

To be a convincing world player, India must rise above neighbourhood troubles. It must place itself at the centre of a virtuous circle of cooperation and friendship with its closest neighbours. This is a difficult task, requiring patience and commitment, yet it must be achieved if the country is to rise to its full potential. Note some encouraging signs: the most deeply embedded problem, Kashmir, came near to solution through backchannel talks with Pakistan. These exchanges need early revival.

Look East
Development of relations with South East Asia and the Far East remains well below optimum. The 'Look East' window is still much smaller than it ought to be and we must push harder in that direction.

Restoration of balance in our dealings in the Middle East is also necessary. The Arab-Israel issue continues to polarise and divide, and India has been distanced from its traditional Arab associates. This must be rectified.

For all the lip service, our economic efforts in places like Africa and Central Asia have languished. Radical changes in our economic diplomacy are needed. We have to be prepared to invest heavily in these resource-rich regions, as China has already done. It may be desirable to set up a separate, well-funded Ministry solely for this purpose.

Don't ignore the Dragon
China will remain a priority area. Currently, we are fairly comfortable with the relationship. The border remains more heavily armed than it need be and to enhance security we should work for mutual reduction of the armed forces deployed against each other. The framework agreements exist and should be put into effect.

Then there is the USA. Its imprint is to be found in every main area where our interests drive us. We should be prepared for continuous dialogue on a wide range of issues. We need to have our own agenda and priorities if it is not to be a one-sided dialogue with the hyper power.

Finally, we need to review and continuously improve the foreign policy instrument, the Indian Foreign Service. This is a high performance group that has made a mark. It needs constant upgrading of skills and performance to retain its edge.

A voter in search of a candidate

By M H Ahssan

The past few weeks have been spent in election mode -- well, that's to be expected in a newspaper office or any other media house. Several candidates have visited us and given us their pitches. While that's very interestingand sometimes great fun as a journalist , it's becomea bit of a downer as a voter. You can't, it seems, really go by the candidate. And, as it happens according to surveys, 60 per cent of the electorate knows that -- it votes by party.

So far, of the selection I've met, there have been well-meaning smart people with not enough street or grassroots cred, grassroots people with no smarts, wishy-washy candidates with no nothing to impress, keen but clueless candidates and over-smart people who are likely to go nowhere as no one knows who they are. Not, then, a very reassuring situation.

Or, a bit of a Rumsfeld situation -- we've got the known knowns, the known unknowns, the unknown knowns and the unknown unknowns. But if one of the joys of electing a Member of Parliament is that he or she is your voice in the national assembly, then you feel a little short-changed.

One candidate only wants to hang Afzal Guru, another is bothered about India's unused uranium deposits, someone else is worried about security, the other about defence deals and yet another about corruption or rather, corrupt people in politics. For some, it's not clear what exactly they represent. Some of these issues are important and others do not really fall under the umbrella of influence which an ordinary MP has. How will this ordinary MP reflect the concerns of the average Mumbaikar in Parliament?

Cannot be, it seems. The municipal issues are not parliamentary issues, although they hurt us or affect us on a daily basis the most. The uranium might be an issue if a nuclear power plant was coming up in an unused mill compound. The hanging of Afzal Guru is not, I'm afraid, going to be a preventive for all future terrorist attacks. It is a salve at best for those who are looking for some blood revenge.

There are, then, it seems, no local Mumbai issues for Mumbai's candidates.

Is this the same for all cities or all parts of India? Do we have candidates who truly represent us, no matter how diverse, different, intelligent, silly, emotional, irrational, scientific, religious, greedy, rich or poor we are? Yes, there are times when we vote for or against this or that party because some party appeals to us and some parties fill us with loathing. This is how it must be. But this does not absolve individual candidates from working for their constituencies or addressing issues which affect them, while at the same time being justifiably worried about uranium or the importance of the death penalty.

Perhaps the problem lies in the political parties themselves and in the way they do not allow dissent in the ranks. Where are the backbenchers who take their own party to task when their constituents are affected or when the part of the manifesto that affects them is ignored or subverted?

Of course, there are and have been candidates who stand for themselves and command loyalty no matter what, candidates who people have learnt to trust or rely on. But these are few and far between. As our version of parliamentary democracy has progressed, we have people who get in because it is a family business, because they have business interests to pursue, because the party has to hand out or return favours or because they have good bargaining power now or at some later stage. The worth of the person is sublimated for the greater good of the party and that accounts for the majority.

Under these circumstances, the search for the good candidate has left me flummoxed. I'm unconvinced by those in my constituency and my heart bleeds for those who have to choose or have chosen in the other 542.

Swine flu over cuckoo markets

By M H Ahssan

When reports of the swine flu - for the medically inclined, a strain, or strains, of H1N1 - pandemic sweeping Mexico and onto other parts of the world broke out late in the weekend, my first thoughts were admittedly about the other flying pigs that have recently been in evidence; particularly, the broad-based jump in global financial markets led by the stock of bankrupt US financial institutions.

Thoughts then turned to more humanitarian concerns, with some questions erupting into my thought process (and in parentheses the answers received as the article was written):

1. What is the actual virus going around; or is it a combination of different flu symptoms common in many parts of the world at this time of the year. (It turns out that the H1N1 strains involved are less lethal but all the more epidemic for that than the H5N1 strain that hit Asia barely five years ago).

2. Is the epicenter of the pandemic in Mexico? (All evidence currently points to this, with the first recorded cases in the middle of March going on to spread to other parts of the world).

3. Are the authorities in Mexico able to quickly quarantine the affected population and control the outbreak? (All evidence currently points to the negative; indeed, it appears that many thousands of Mexicans are moving away from the affected areas, in effect guaranteeing the spread of the virus).

4. Is there enough stock of anti-flu medicines available in Mexico and the southern part of the United States? (The simple answer is "no". The known anti-flu vaccines have been in short supply through much of the world since the last big flu scare in Europe in 2007; it is possible that authorities only have enough supplies to treat the first few thousand people infected).

5. Where did the cases now erupting in other countries including Spain, France, Australia and the United Kingdom come from? (We don't seem to know that yet, but it is most likely tourists returning from Mexico from their Easter holidays).

6. Why are the global media - financial and otherwise - dithering on what could well be the most important story of this year? (For the same reasons that they have only been playing up good news over the past few months and de-emphasizing bad news. In other words, I really don't know the answer to that question).

As I fish through global financial media websites, it appears that while swine flu is an important headline, it is not quite a "top" news item. On the Bloomberg website for example, the story appears at item four (or item eight if you include breaking news), with the title "US Stocks Drop on Speculation Swine Flu Outbreak to Hurt Global Economy". Similarly on the websites for the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, the swine flu story is all about the impact on the stock markets for the day and has been assigned lower importance than say the story about the debt-to-equity swap offer made by General Motors and the specter of former Merrill Lynch chief executive John Thain hitting back at Bank of America executives allegedly maligning his good name.

This after both the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) issued statements that highlight the following reasons for classifying swine flu as a potential pandemic in their statement dated April 24:

New strain
The virus is a new strain of influenza, from which human populations have not been vaccinated or naturally immunized.

Human transmission
The virus appeared to infect by human-to-human transmission. Investigations of infected patients indicated no direct contact with swine, such as at a farm or agricultural fair. The strain was later confirmed to have been transmitted between humans. However, at least one other strain of swine flu has previously been transmitted between humans without wider community infection. In contrast, for example, disease transmission in the last severe human outbreak of influenza, the bird flu that peaked in 2006, was determined to be almost entirely from direct contact between humans and birds.

Virulence
The virus has produced severe disease in Mexico, and some deaths. Furthermore, in Mexico (but not in the United States) the illness has primarily struck young, healthy adults, much like the deadly Spanish Flu of 1918, possibly because of the phenomenon known as cytokine storm. Most other influenza strains produce the worst symptoms in young children, elderly adults and others with weaker immune systems.

Geography
The virus has been detected in multiple areas, indicating that containment is unlikely. This is exacerbated by the incubation and infectious periods of influenza.

Lack of data
That other factors are still somewhat unknown, such as transmission rates and patterns and effectiveness of current influenza treatments, combined with the unpredictability of influenza strains, means that reliable forecasts cannot be made.
In effect, put in simple English, what the CDC and the WHO are saying above is that the potential pandemic is more deadly than what was seen previously with the bird flu virus; as it is a new strain, there are few if any people with the immunity to handle the outbreak, and by hitting the strongest members of the population the virus has a latent tendency to spread faster, and it is already manifest in many regions of the world.

As per its update at 21:38 GMT on April 27, the WHO raised its pandemic alert to four from three, which is still two short of the six required to signify an actual pandemic.

Silence of the lambs
There is a typical spring ritual being played out in the financial media; much as lambs going to their slaughter rarely whine, so too the financial media do not report on the most important bits of news or their implications until well after the events play into reality.

The reason for my angst is not so much the actual reporting of the above news, as it is clear that while some people including me are classifying this as a pandemic, others including the responsible officers at the CDC/WHO aren't yet there. That is a matter of opinion: when I see a disease with 2,000 recorded cases in one country over the course of a few days with a mortality rate of close to 7.5% and the same disease presents itself in numerous other countries, it is cause for alarm. For doctors and government officials, different standards apply, so one can live with that.

However, the media have once again missed the beat here. Over the past few weeks, the gravity-defying performance of the stock markets was led by the doubling of financial stocks - the broad KBW index of US financial stocks almost doubled from its mid-March lows - even as overall economic news, including confidence, industrial production, consumption and most importantly, employment, all took a nosedive.

Every ounce of bad news has been greeted by a response from government and market figures suggesting that the "worst is over", that is, that economic growth appears negative now but will soon resume a positive trajectory, perhaps as early as 2010.

Indeed, the UK government in unveiling its budget last week (see G-8's first bankruptcy, Asia Times Online, April 25, 2009), went to the extraordinary length of suggesting a 0.6% expansion in 2010 after a 3.5% contraction in 2009. Most private sector economists, in contrast, expect the UK economy to shrink by 5% this year and at least half that amount next year.

Similarly, the widely expected bank stress tests of the US government are expected to use similar, low-stress economic assumptions; in effect expecting the general increase in the tide to lift all boats (it is unclear to me how a tide will lift boats that have sprung rather large leaks, but that's just your resident cynic talking).

Given the importance of these optimistic assumptions to the overall market story, wouldn't you expect more folks in the financial media to focus a bit on the kind of developments that could derail these projections? After all, the bird flu, while a less virulent strain of the species-jumping virus than appears to be involved in the present swine flu outbreak, did take a rather large bite out of the economic growth of Asian countries in 2004.

Using even the same assumptions means that a good 0.5-1.0% of global economic activity could shrink in the form of lower tourism, general business traffic, days lost to disease and sickness, the impact of fear on consumption behavior etc. This up to a 1% decline in global gross domestic product is also higher than whatever turnaround has been predicted for next year; so you would expect the financial media to pay more attention to the matter.

There is something of a misanthropist view coming out from the possible outbreak of a pandemic that highlights mankind's unhealthy fascination for farmed animal products and a food-production process that is proven to be unsustainable in the long run due to its excessive use of land and agricultural resources as well as the significant pollution caused by the raising, culling and transporting of livestock.

Viewed from a different perspective, the pandemic is but a natural manifestation of what is being seen in the global financial markets, where some investors have railed against the excesses of Western countries borrowing well beyond their means to fund a lifestyle that proved unsustainable.

Think of it this way: do you know of anyone living in America or Europe who still dreams of buying a US$1 million mansion on the San Andreas Fault, with a loan given ultimately by a bunch of hardworking Chinese factory workers? Much as that particular chapter in the history of the world economy is now closed, so too will the curtain descend on mankind's unsustainable and grossly unequal use of land, fresh water and other scarce resources into a single-minded pursuit of farming meat.