The only panic in Mexico was from the loss of tourism....Read my lips...Hospiten which is the hospital that I use in Playa del Carmen CLOSED because they had no patients. They did reopen after June when I returned but they CLOSED down and this is a beautiful new hospital. The only reason anyone died in Mexico from the flu is because there is virtually no medicine there to fight it.
The reason people in Mexico died from the H1N1 flu is identical to the reason people have died from this virus all over the world ... it is because the flu causes healthy immune systems to overreact. Tamiflu is the treatment, but only if it's caught early enough. People with H1N1 have been put into an induced coma for 4-6 weeks while doctors try to keep them alive. In Mexico, where the first outbreak occurred in April of 2009, the entire country and world were aware of what was happening. Many people that were sick with the flu survived, yet many died.
As for medicine in Mexico, it's easy to find, but it's not pre-mixed as with North American pharmacists. For example, the patient needs to add distilled water to powder to make amoxicillin. Furthermore, doctors may be very wrong in their diagnosis. I was in Cancun with a 6 month old child. He became feverish and developed a rash. We had 2-3 on call hotel doctors diagnose my son. They came up with everything from dehydration (that relates to the fever), to some sort of skin irritation (that relates to the rash), to finally prescribing an antibiotic (that relates to a shot in the dark). I phoned our family doctor who diagnosed baby measles over the phone based on my description of the symptoms. No treatment was recommended other than treating the symptoms. Recommending antibiotics was wrong, as were other conclusions. That could be one reason why the flu spread so quickly and was undiagnosed for too long in Mexico.
Hybrid Mode
