Pigs Can't Fly, But Viruses Can

This is not the year of the pig, but the rapid spread of the swine flu will definitely put pigs as one of the top stories of 2009. And if we thought 2008 was a bad year…well, 2009 so far is not turning out to be much better.

The flu has already reached New Zealand and Israel and in the words of the assistant director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) “In this age of global travel, where people move around in airplanes so quickly, there is no region to which this virus could not spread”.

The epicenter seems to be Mexico and this is very bad news for the country. Tourism is the third most important economic sector in Mexico, generating roughly 9% of its GDP. The vast majority of visitors come from the US, but now with the flu the number of visitors is expected to drop significantly, especially since the US government is advising against nonessential travel to Mexico.

One of my co-workers had a vacation scheduled for Acapulco starting next weekend, and she cancelled her plans yesterday after growing concerns about the flu (plus there was an earthquake in Acapulco yesterday afternoon…). The decision to cancel a trip or not has a lot to do with how much you know about the situation and I find that in health related matters, the WHO website is very helpful - http://www.who.int/en/. It has up-to-date info and FAQs, and probably at some point they’ll have a table indicating how many cases of swine flu have been confirmed where and the number of fatalities in each country (they did this for SARS back in 2003 and based on that tracking, we went ahead with a trip we had scheduled for Thailand in April of that year).

But with or without epidemics or pandemics, there are some precautions that should be taken whenever you go abroad. My favorite is “If you can cook it, boil it or peel it, you can eat it…otherwise forget it!”. When traveling, I only drink bottled water, do not take ice and in general only drink bottled juices. Plus, it’s worth checking the Traveler’s Health section of the Centers for Disease Control website at http://www.cdc.gov/ to find out the major health risks in the place you’re traveling to.