Panic, Fear Spread Over Deadly Flu Threat in Mexico, U.S.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

MEXICO CITY — The schools and museums are closed. Sold-out games between Mexico's most popular soccer teams are being played in empty stadiums. Health workers are ordering sickly passengers off subways and buses. And while bars and nightclubs filled up as usual, even some teenagers were dancing with surgical masks on.

Across this overcrowded capital of 20 million people, Mexicans are reacting with fatalism and confusion, anger and mounting fear at the idea that their city may be ground zero for a global epidemic of a new kind of flu — a strange mix of human, pig and bird viruses that has epidemiologists deeply concerned.

Tests show 20 people in Mexico have died of the new swine flu strain, and that 48 other deaths were probably due to the same strain. The caseload of those sickened has grown to 1,004 nationwide, Mexico's Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said.

Read the rest of the article here....

My take:

"NLE 09 will be an operations-based exercise to include: activities taking place at command posts, emergency operation centers, intelligence centers and potential field locations to include federal headquarters facilities in the Washington D.C. area, and in federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector facilities in FEMA Region VI, which includes the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas."

Both New Mexico and Texas border Mexico. What's to stop a mass exodus north from Mexico because of this "Panic, Fear Spread Over Deadly Flu Threat in Mexico..."? (to quote the title of this article)

NLE 09 is supposed to happen July 27 through July 31, 2009. Could this date be pushed forward in light of this current 'pandemic' threat?

Only time will tell, IMHO.