In general, South America has not confirmed a significant amount of people with swine flu, which raises some eyebrows as it is one of the main regions that send and receive people from Mexico. Right now Brazil has 8 confirmed swine flu cases, 37 suspect cases and, curiosly, 188 cases that were dismissed as swine flu.
Of the 8 confirmed patients, 2 where infected in Brazil, from a 21-year-old that went to Cancún in his vacation and infected one of his friend and mother when he arrived. After he arrived from Mexico, he started feeling feverish, which he thought was a consequence of sun dehydration. The next day, he went to a private doctor, which concluded he had not swine flu. As the symptons persisted for another day, he decided to go to a hospital to be isolated. The young man has been released from hospital yesterday after being isolated for 10 days.
What is worrying about this story is that the patient went to a dance club after he arrived from Mexico. At the moment, Brazilian hospitals are screening for people with flu-like symptoms that have been abroad in the last 10 days. What about people that went to the same dance club as this patient?
Another worrying aspect of Brazil´s screening system is that Brazil has a significant number of flights that comes from Mexico every day, the number of people coming from Mexico has been estimated to be twice the number of people that go to UK from Mexico. However, UK has reported 71 swine flu cases and we reported 8. Are we missing people infected with swine flu in Brazil? Is there another reason for those contrasting numbers?
Flu surveillance is very deficient in Brazil as we do not know what flu virus varieties are found in the population and their infection dynamics. Add that to the incoming flu season in hemisphere and we have a lot of reasons to worry. It is possible that we will only realise the size of the problem when it is too late.
However, what scares me most is how uninformed some of our key politicians are, like São Paulo state governor, former Brazil´s Health Ministrer, that said, when the first swine flu reports arrived: “Swine flu is transmitted from little pigs to people only when they sneeze or when the person get too close to the pig´s nose.”