Back to work (or To heck with the swine flu! eat a taco al pastor!)

I haven't been active on this Ning for the past couple of weeks due to that lovely H1N1 bug that got everyone into a tizzy. While I didnt get sick (thank goodness), its really hard to get motivated to do anything when life is so out-of-whack. Finally, high schools and unis have reopened and Im back at work. Life in Mexico City is slowly coming back to normal, esp. if you consider it normal to have someone do a health screening on you coming back onto campus after buying a cup of coffee at 7-11! (Do you have a fever? a cough?)

*sigh*

OK... lets be real here and lets give credit where credit is due. The Mexican government had a really lousy hand dealt to it but has handled the situation well. As soon as test results came back from Canada stating the flu was a new strain with swine and avian characteristics, they shut schools down late on a Thursday night, with the order coming from the federal, not local government. This was important because in this culture, orders really need to come from the top for people here to take them seriously. Many other activities where curtailed but the greatest effect the shutdown had was psychological, causing people to take the precautions which basically has stopped the spread of the virus and make the outbreak peak quickly. It does not matter that it turned out that this strain is not as deadly or contagious as feared, since there is no way to know that before it is too late to implement these kinds of measures.

My comments in the first paragraph have a lot more to do with the fact that I am tired of this flu business more than anything else. I think WHO deserves to be roundly criticized and needs to serious modify its pandemic alert system as it was and is still creating hysteria over this bug, even though it is not what we have feared. This is forcing Mexico to be overdoing it a bit now, even though we know this flu is no more deadly than normal. They need to reinstill confidence, if for no other reason than the tourism business, which is taking a real hit right now and the summer is coming. The flu and WHO's continued response have done much harm to Mexico economically. Fortunately, this harm wont last forever, but if I were Mexico, I would be less enthusiastic about cooperating with WHO.i

By the way, for you outside of Mexico, a "taco al pastor" is a taco with pork that has been at least partially cooked on a rotisserie.