World on alert as Mexico sees flu 'stabilisation'

Daily Star, May 03

Mexico has said its H1N1 flu outbreak appeared to be "in a stabilization phase", as it tried to mitigate the economic cost of the crisis, joining Canada and the United States in hitting out at pork boycotts.

Mexico said Saturday the national death toll from the epidemic reached 19, as health officials around the world remained on high alert as more cases were confirmed in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

"I believe we have enough elements to say that we are in a stabilization phase," said Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova, who confirmed that the tally of cases, including those who have died, had risen to 473.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported at least 615 cases in around 15 countries.

In Geneva, a WHO official indicated the virus had not spread in a sustained way outside of the Americas, a condition necessary to declare a full global pandemic.

"We see no evidence of sustained community spread outside North America," said Mike Ryan, WHO Director of Global Alert and Response.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 160 confirmed cases spread across 21 states and said additional cases and perhaps even deaths could follow.

Authorities in New York said the city may have seen more than 1,000 cases, but carriers were likely recovering or recovered.

In Canada, some 30 new cases were reported on Saturday, bringing the total number of people infected throughout the country to over 85.

Officials also confirmed H1N1 cases had been detected in a pig herd in Alberta, likely contracted from a man who recently returned from Mexico.

The three North American nations tried to mitigate the economic impact of the crisis, hitting out at countries which had slapped bans on their pork products.

"We strongly urge the international community not to use the outbreak of the H1N1 influenza as a reason to create unnecessary trade restrictions and that decisions be made based on sound scientific evidence," the country's said in a joint statement.

Nearly 20 countries, including China and Russia, have imposed bans on the importation of pigs and pork products from Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Mexico also hit out at China, which it said had placed "unjustified" health measures being taken against Mexicans arriving to the country.

Elsewhere South Korea, Ireland and Italy confirmed their first cases, but all three countries said their patients had made swift recoveries.

Hong Kong confirmed a 25-year-old Mexican who arrived from Mexico via Shanghai had brought the first case of swine flu into a city living in fear of a repeat of the SARS virus and bird flu outbreaks of recent years.

Police on Friday sealed off the Hong Kong hotel where he had briefly stayed and placed the building and more than 300 guests and staff under a seven-day quarantine.

The case sparked a regional alert, with China immediately ordering health authorities to track down and isolate the man's fellow passengers, while some pharmacies in Hong Kong sold out of face masks.

India and Japan also reported suspected cases, with Japanese authorities saying a four-month-old baby from the United States was being tested.

The alarm caused by the flu was evident in Egypt, which began slaughtering its 250,000 pigs began despite the WHO insisting there was no evidence that the animals were transmitting the virus to humans.

Benin became the second African country to report a suspected case of the flu as Health Minister Issifou Takpara told AFP that a European woman may have contracted the virus during a trip in Mexico.

British officials confirmed two new cases, bringing the total to 15, including one person who appeared to have been infected in Britain by someone recently returned from Mexico.

Israel reported a third case -- a man recently returned from Mexico -- while confirmed cases in Spain rose to 20. German officials said a patient had infected a fellow patient and a nurse, bringing the number of cases there to six.

But health authorities said the world appeared better prepared to fight an epidemic than a few years ago, and promised that a vaccine was only months away.

"We have no doubt that making a successful vaccine is possible in a relatively short period of time," Marie-Paule Kieny, director of WHO's Initiative for Vaccine Research said Friday. Vaccine production, she added, could take four to six months.

Most cases outside Mexico have involved only mild symptoms of the illness treatable with existing flu medicines.

Some experts have suggested the virus may have weakened as it was carried outside the country.

Favorite Comment ...

"For every beauty, there is an eye somewhere to see it.

For every truth, there is an ear somewhere to hear it.

For every love, there is a heart somewhere to receive it."

Allen & “September on Jessore Road”

First I read “September on Jessore Road” when I was on the way of my BBA Program at Shahjalal University. 

In the first semester we had an English Course & Masum sir went through this one. Later on, in Sunil’s

 “Chobir deshe, Kobitar deshe” I found Allen who expressed his desire openly and graphically in his poetry.

 Mousumi Bhoumik of Calcutta is famous for her song “Jessore Road” derived from Allen Ginsberg. 

How touchy the poem is !!!

 Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is cherished as the pivotal figure between the 50s Beat Generation and the 

counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s. He was born in Newark, New Jersey the son of a high school teacher 

and poet, Louis Ginsberg, and Naomi Levy Ginsberg. Ginsberg studied at Columbia University where he made 

crucial friendships with writers such as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Ginsberg's first book of poems, 

the extraordinary Howl and other poems was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights press in 1955 

and was subject to a famous obscenity trial due to its frank treatment of his homosexuality and explicit content.

Ginsberg's poetry with its exhilarating openness of subject and form and visionary qualities owes much to a

 tradition stretching back through Walt Whitman to William Blake. Added to this are influences from his Jewish 

background, the rhythms of jazz, his sexual orientation and his deep engagement with Zen Buddhism.

September on Jessore Road

Millions of babies watching the skies

Bellies swollen, with big round eyes

On Jessore Road--long bamboo huts

Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts

Millions of fathers in rain

Millions of mothers in pain

Millions of brothers in woe

Millions of sisters nowhere to go

One Million aunts are dying for bread

One Million uncles lamenting the dead

Grandfather millions homeless and sad

Grandmother millions silently mad

Millions of daughters walk in the mud

Millions of children wash in the flood

A Million girls vomit & groan

Millions of families hopeless alone

Millions of souls nineteenseventyone

homeless on Jessore road under grey sun

A million are dead, the million who can

Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan

Taxi September along Jessore Road

Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load

past watery fields thru rain flood ruts

Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts

Wet processions   Families walk

Stunted boys    big heads don't talk

Look bony skulls   & silent round eyes

Starving black angels in human disguise

Mother squats weeping & points to her sons

Standing thin legged    like elderly nuns

small bodied    hands to their mouths in prayer

Five months small food    since they settled there

on one floor mat   with small empty pot

Father lifts up his hands at their lot

Tears come to their mother's eye

Pain makes mother Maya cry

Two children together    in palmroof shade

Stare at me   no word is said

Rice ration, lentils   one time a week

Milk powder for warweary infants meek

No vegetable money or work for the man

Rice lasts four days    eat while they can

Then children starve    three days in a row

and vomit their next food   unless they eat slow.

On Jessore road    Mother wept at my knees

Bengali tongue    cried mister Please

Identity card    torn up on the floor

Husband still waits    at the camp office door

Baby at play I was washing the flood

Now they won't give us any more food

The pieces are here in my celluloid purse

Innocent baby play    our death curse

Two policemen surrounded     by thousands of boys

Crowded waiting    their daily bread joys

Carry big whistles    & long bamboo sticks

to whack them in line    They play hungry tricks

Breaking the line   and jumping in front

Into the circle    sneaks one skinny runt

Two brothers dance forward    on the mud stage

Teh gaurds blow their whistles    & chase them in rage

Why are these infants    massed in this place

Laughing in play    & pushing for space

Why do they wait here so cheerful   & dread

Why this is the House where they give children bread

The man in the bread door   Cries & comes out

Thousands of boys and girls    Take up his shout

Is it joy? is it prayer?    "No more bread today"

Thousands of Children  at once scream "Hooray!"

Run home to tents    where elders await

Messenger children   with bread from the state

No bread more today! & and no place to squat

Painful baby, sick shit he has got.

Malnutrition skulls thousands for months

Dysentery drains    bowels all at once

Nurse shows disease card    Enterostrep

Suspension is wanting    or else chlorostrep

Refugee camps    in hospital shacks

Newborn lay naked    on mother's thin laps

Monkeysized week old    Rheumatic babe eye

Gastoenteritis Blood Poison    thousands must die

September Jessore    Road rickshaw

50,000 souls   in one camp I saw

Rows of bamboo    huts in the flood

Open drains, & wet families waiting for food

Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,

American Angel machine   please come fast!

Where is Ambassador Bunker today?

Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?

Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?

Smuggling dope in Bangkok's green shade.

Where is America's Air Force of Light?

Bombing North Laos all day and all night?

Where are the President's Armies of Gold?

Billionaire Navies    merciful Bold?

Bringing us medicine    food and relief?

Napalming North Viet Nam    and causing more grief?

Where are our tears?  Who weeps for the pain?

Where can these families go in the rain?

Jessore Road's children close their big eyes

Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?

Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?

Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul'd lair?

Millions of children alone in the rain!

Millions of children weeping in pain!

Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe

Ring out ye voices for Love we don't know

Ring out ye bells of electrical pain

Ring in the conscious of America brain

How many children are we who are lost

Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?

What are our souls that we have lost care?

Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare--

Cries in the mud by the thatch'd house sand drain

Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain

waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!

whose children still starve    in their mother's arms curled.

Is this what I did to myself in the past?

What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?

Move on and leave them without any coins?

What should I care for the love of my loins?

What should we care for our cities and cars?

What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?

How many millions sit down in New York

& sup this night's table on bone & roast pork?

How many millions of beer cans are tossed

in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?

Cigar gasolines and   asphalt car dreams

Stinking the world and dimming star beams --

Finish the war in your breast    with a sigh

Come tast the tears    in your own Human eye

Pity us millions of phantoms you see

Starved in Samsara   on planet TV

How many millions of children die more

before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?

How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild

Armed forces that boast    the children they've killed?

How many souls walk through Maya in pain

How many babes    in illusory pain?

How many families   hollow eyed  lost?

How many grandmothers    turning to ghost?

How many loves who never get bread?

How many Aunts with holes in their head?

How many sisters skulls on the ground?

How many grandfathers   make no more sound?

How many fathers in woe

How many sons   nowhere to go?

How many daughters    nothing to eat?

How many uncles   with swollen sick feet?

Millions of babies in pain

Millions of mothers in rain

Millions of brothers in woe

Millions of children    nowhere to go 

                                                       November 14-16, 1971

Visit: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Allen-Ginsberg/3697