Madness in the Southern Hemisphere

Argentine President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner with barbijo (facemask)

Buenos Aires, my home away from home for these past few months has descended into all kinds of craziness in the past few days. A couple days ago they declared a state of emergency in the face of Gripe A the new name for our old friend the swine flu.

I know many of you are probably wondering what I'm talking about. Swine flu? Weren't we all done with that several months ago? Haven't we moved on to more important things like the death of Michael Jackson or Iranian elections or the military coup in Honduras?

But things are different here in the bottom of the world mostly, I suspect, due to one important fact: the southern hemisphere. Buenos Aires has all the right ingredients to keep the swine flu going. First of all for my friends and family in Cleveland, Ohio, it may be hard to remember while you're on the beach and chilling in air conditioned houses, that while flu season is long gone for the north, down here it is the dead of winter (which is actually pretty pathetic by Cleveland standards). So flu season is in full peak. On top of that, Buenos Aires is one of the biggest cities in the world and is, I think, the second in the Southern Hemisphere. I think Rio beats BA but they don't have much to worry about when it comes to cold, they're probably still lying on the beach as we speak (as usual). Being a big city full of international visitors means that it's more likely to have folks from nasty flu infested places come for a visit and bring gifts.

Most of the rest of the other Southern Hemisphere countries are either not that cold, or not that popular. Somehow Buenos Aires is both.

This is a very unhappy fact and while it would be annoying enough if I were living on my own, living with a pair of seventy year-olds. The couple that I live with, particularly Irma, the wife, are very concerned about the flu. This is, I suppose, with good reason as it has the potential to be more dangerous to them than it would be to me.

Still it does seem to be bordering on insanity at times. But it's not just them. The other night the whole family (myself, Irma and her husband Roberto and two of their adult children Hernan and Milagros) were seated around the television listening to the public health people talk about "the situation" while every five minutes Irma gets a call one of her daughters telling her that the government is lying and hiding cases and telling her how bad the situation really is (she works in a hospital, but then again that makes the information biased--hospitals are full of sick people).

So when I went to the doctor yesterday complaining of sneezing, a cough and a sore throat, the guy got about three phone calls just in the twenty minutes that I was there and complained of how much people were overreacting. I showed up with a face mask mostly because my host family asked me too and was amused to find that he wasn't wearing one and asked me to take it off so that he could check my throat, breathing etc. You would think that if doctors aren't even using them they couldn't be good for much.

But it's a crazy world out there. When you don't have too many facts and you don't really trust the people who are giving you advice (the government) it's easy to get a little paranoid.

My solution: I'm getting out of this town till things settle down. Details to follow.