According to the British paper The Guardian, doctors think that they may have found the first patient to contract the swine flu virus that’s now making the world so nervous.
The patient is four-year old Edgar Hernandez from the village of La Gloria, Veracruz, Mexico.
"A" is for "Holy shit, SWINE FLU!"
It’s just a dot on the map east of Mexico City, but La Gloria has been ravaged by the disease, with 60% of the population ill!
It’s important for epidemiologists to find the so-called “Patient Zero” (better termed the index case) so you can investigate things like
- the rate of contraction for the disease (that is, how easy it was for people to catch)
- statistics on those people who did come down ill with the disease (what other conditions did they have? age, sex, etc.)
- investigate the mortality rate based on factors gleaned from this data.
Knowing where the disease started is a good thing.