When I Was Young

June 17, 2009 -- Updated 2349 GMT (0749 HKT)

Story Highlights

• 870 packages of cocaine weighing almost a ton found inside sharks, navy says
  
• Discovery made at southeastern port of Progreso in the Yucatan state
  
• Inspectors detected anomaly in two shipping containers during a routine X-ray
  

The cargo, which was aboard the freight ship Dover Strait, had been loaded in Costa Rica, Mexican navy says.

(CNN) -- The Mexican navy smelled something fishy and their intuition paid off. They found nearly a ton of cocaine hidden inside a shipment of frozen sharks.

Navy inspectors at the southeastern port of Progreso, in Yucatan state, on Tuesday detected an anomaly in two shipping containers during a routine X-ray, according to a navy news release.

The inspectors zeroed in on a shipment of sharks. Upon slitting one of the frozen fish open, they found black bags containing rectangular packets filled with cocaine.

In all, authorities recovered 870 packages of cocaine, weighing 894 kilograms (about 1,967 pounds), the navy reported Wednesday.

In recent years, Mexico and the United States have stepped up drug enforcement efforts, pushing more of the drug trade to sea routes and forcing drug smugglers to find more creative ways to hide their contraband.

The cargo was aboard the freight ship Dover Strait and had been loaded in Costa Rica, the navy said.

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

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June 9, 2009 -- Updated 0256 GMT (1056 HKT)

Story Highlights

• NEW: Relatives of victims plan to march Wednesday evening
  
• Two owners resign to avoid any obstruction in the fire investigation, they say
  
• Co-owner: We didn't use government positions to obtain the day-care concession
  
• 44 children died in the day-care fire Friday in Hermosillo, Mexico
  

On Monday, two girls lay flowers during a funeral of one of the 44 children who died in the day-care fire.

HERMOSILLO, Mexico (CNN) -- Two of the owners of the day-care center that burned Friday, killing 44 children, have resigned jobs they had with the government, they told reporters Tuesday.

Antonio Salido, a functionary for the state of Sonora's secretary of urban infrastructure, and Alfonso Escalante, a sub-secretary of livestock farming, said they were resigning so that there would be no obstruction in the investigation into the cause of the fire.

Salido, speaking for both men, told reporters they had not used their government positions to obtain the day-care concession.

"We want to show you how deeply we feel about what happened in the terrible accident that occurred at ABC Day Care," he said.

"It passed the security measures and norms of operation required by the Mexican Institute of Social Security," he said, referring to the governmental organization that oversees the state-run school.

He noted that the institute's director, Daniel Karam Toumeh, said Sunday that the building had passed an inspection on May 26.

Abel Murrieta Gutierrez, the attorney general of Sonora, told CNN en Español that the investigation would not be affected by the fact that two of the owners worked for the government.

"It doesn't matter to us if they were or were not functionaries," he said.

Relatives of the victims and people seeking better security for day-care centers are planning to march Wednesday evening from near the day-care center to the government center.

The fire started Friday afternoon in an air-conditioning unit located in an adjacent warehouse, the attorney general of Sonora said Monday. Investigators are trying to determine whether the fire was caused by an overheated motor or deficiencies in its installation, Abel Murrieta Gutierrez said.

The fire then moved toward bookshelves on a wall shared with the building housing the center, which held 141 children and day-care workers, he added.

The two buildings also shared a roof, which contained a false bottom made of polyurethane. That overheated, emitting toxic fumes, he said.

As of Tuesday, 22 children remained hospitalized with burns.

One of them was the daughter of Raul Alvarez, who prayed Tuesday at an improvised altar outside the Children's Hospital in Hermosillo. "We went to see her this morning, and she was stable, the little girl," he said.

Hermosillo is the capital of the state of Sonora, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) south of the U.S. border in northwestern Mexico.

It has no hospitals that specialize in burns, so doctors here have been working to stabilize those most badly burned before sending them on for treatment in other cities.

"The most important thing is not so much the burn, but stabilizing them, making sure the kidney is functioning, the lung is functioning, the liver is functioning, the brain is functioning," said Raymond Lopez, Sonora's health secretary.

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

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Latest, updated 2 hours, 15 minutes ago

Story Highlights
NEW: Funerals for children killed in Mexican day care center fire begin
Neighbors describe panic, horror as parents try to rescue kids from burning building
One door was padlocked shut and children couldn't get to high windows, officials say
At least 41 children die in fire; dozens more in hospitals in Mexico and U.S.

Maria Jesus Coronado Padilla mourns her 2-year-old daughter, Paulette Daniela Coronado Padilla on Sunday.

HERMOSILLO, Mexico (CNN) -- Parents in northern Mexico on Sunday began to bury the children who died in a horrific day care fire as Mexican authorities raised the death toll from the blaze to 41.

A large crowd of mourners attended a funeral for six of the victims Sunday afternoon in Hermosillo, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) south of the U.S. border. The cause of Friday's fire at ABC Day Care wasn't known, but investigators concluded that the fire didn't start inside the building, said Eduardo Bours, the governor of Sonora state.

Neighbors described parents arriving at the day care center completely desperate on Friday, seeing it engulfed in flames and knowing there was no way to get the children out. The building had two doors, one of which was padlocked shut, and windows were too high for the children to reach, officials said.

Some parents rammed their vehicles into the building to try to free the trapped children, witnesses told CNN.

"When we went out and ran towards the nursery, teachers already had many children outside, those who could walk properly," said one man at the scene, who did not give his name. "A pickup truck broke down the walls. The dad of one of the kids broke down one of the walls with his car driving in reverse, and that helped us a bit."

Others said they waited for hours for news of their children.

"They didn't tell us anything, nothing, until like 6 p.m.," said Ofelia Vasquez, whose 4-year-old son Herman was in the building. She said she eventually was told he was at Chavez Hospital.

"We went there and we saw that he was badly burned, 75 percent of his body was burned," she said.

Herman Vasquez died after surgery, his mother said.

As of Sunday afternoon, 26 children remained hospitalized, 12 of them in critical condition, Sonoran authorities said. Another 10 children had been transported to other hospitals: eight to Guadalajara, one to Ciudad, Obregon, and two to Sacramento, California.

A team of 29 medical experts in Hermosillo was deciding if any more victims would be moved to the Shriners Hospital for Children in Sacramento, or elsewhere.

In addition, six adults were injured, Sonora spokesman Daniel Duran said.

"Without a doubt this is the worst disaster we've had," Bours told CNN.

President Felipe Calderon traveled to Hermosillo on Saturday. He arrived with Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont and Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova to get firsthand updates from doctors and investigators, the state news agency Notimex reported.

Calderon ordered the nation's attorney general to investigate the blaze.

Most of the victims died from smoke inhalation and not burns, Bours said. But the fire was serious enough for the roof to collapse, he added.

At the time of the blaze, 142 children were inside the ABC Day Care. The day care is for children ages 2 to 4, but Bours confirmed that children even younger were among the victims.

All the children at the center had been accounted for by Saturday evening, Bours said.

A severely burned 3-year-old girl arrived Saturday at the Sacramento hospital -- where pediatric burn treatment is a specialty -- and was in critical condition, according to Dr. Tina Palmieri, assistant chief of the burn unit.

The child was burned over 80 percent of her body, the doctor told reporters. She said the hospital normally can save just over half of the children with burns that severe.

In Hermosillo, a large crowd gathered outside of the emergency entrance of the city's general hospital and many people consoled each other, video from the scene showed.

"They told me that this happened in a matter of five minutes," Hermosillo Mayor Ernesto Gandara told reporters after surveying the scene.

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

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Posted: 07 June 2009 1206 hrs

Police officers seal off the front of a building where children died in a fire in Hermosillo, Sonora state, Mexico

HERMOSILLO, Mexico: Mexico on Saturday mourned the deaths of at least 38 young victims of a daycare centre fire as parents carried out painful identifications of charred bodies.

Most of the fatalities from the Friday blaze at the state-run ABC daycare centre in Hermosillo, in northwestern Mexico, were under the age of two. With many still hospitalised in critical condition, the toll was expected to rise.

As fraught parents sat outside hospitals awaiting word on the fate of their children, questions were raised about how the fire began and whether deaths could have been prevented.

President Felipe Calderon cut short a trip to the resort town of Cancun and flew to Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora state, to respond to the tragedy, a presidential source told AFP.

He was scheduled to visit a hospital where victims have been taken and meet with local authorities, the source said.

“I have ordered the federal prosecutor to as soon as possible carry out investigations to help us know exactly what and how it happened, and to work out corresponding responsibility," Calderon said in Cancun.

Sonora state health secretary Raymundo Lopez said that 38 children have died and another 23 remain hospitalized, including 15 who are in extremely serious condition.

Sonora Governor Eduardo Bours said six adults had also been hospitalised after the blaze, which broke out when many at the daycare centre, located in an Hermosillo working class neighbourhood, were taking an afternoon nap.

Police officers seal off the front of a building where children died in a fire in Hermosillo, Sonora state, Mexico

Some of the injured had been transferred to the western state of Jalisco to be treated by doctors specialized in children's burns, said Daniel Karam of the Mexican Social Security Institute.

One was even flown to a burns unit at a hospital in Sacramento in the US state of California.

Jose Larrinaga, a spokesman for the local prosecutor's office, told reporters that it was too early to announce a final toll.

Most of the children died from smoke inhalation, officials said. Others died when the roof in the crib room collapsed.

Questions were already being raised about whether the deaths could have been prevented.

The centre lacked emergency exits and the structure was so weak that part of the roof caved in, on an area where many newborn babies were sleeping, reports said.

Local media suggested the fire had started in a neighboring tire shop, a claim the shop owners quickly denied, according to news reports.

The local prosecutor's office cautioned against premature conclusions, saying at the moment "it would be adventurous to pass judgment on what caused the fire."

In desperate scenes Friday, nearby residents smashed through the cement walls of the centre using cars and vans to try to save the children.

Emergency services arrived a good while after locals began bringing victims out, witnesses told AFP.

A 40-year-old man who lives in front of the centre and was the first to arrive told La Reforma daily how he handed burnt and lifeless bodies that he pulled from the building to his neighbours.

"It was a terrifying experience," said the man, identified as Roberto Bustamente, as he choked on tears. "There was a lot of smoke, but there were no children's cries. They were all unconscious or dead."

Some of the victims were buried Saturday, including the young daughter of a couple whose second daughter is hospitalized in serious condition.

- AFP/yb

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

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June 6, 2009 -- Updated 0256 GMT (1056 HKT)

Story Highlights

NEW: President Felipe Calderon travels to Hermosillo to meet with health officials

NEW: Officials believe blaze did not start in center; attorney general to investigate

NEW: 23 children remained hospitalized, 15 of them in critical condition

One child admitted to Shriners Hospitals in Sacramento, California

A crib and baby seats lie outside a day care center Friday in Hermosillo, Mexico, as police cordon off the area.

HERMOSILLO, Mexico (CNN) -- President Felipe Calderon traveled to Hermosillo on Saturday to meet with health officials as the death toll of a day care center fire there grew to 38 children.

The cause of Friday's blaze remained unknown, but investigators concluded that the fire did not start inside the ABC Day Care, Eduardo Bours, the governor of Sonora state said.

As of Saturday night, 23 children remained hospitalized, 15 of them in critical condition, Sonora spokesman Daniel Duran told CNN. Another 10 children had been transported to other hospitals: eight to Guadalajara, one to Ciudad Obregon, and one to Sacramento, California.

A team of 29 medical experts in Hermosillo were deciding if any more victims would be moved to the Shriners Hospital in Sacramento, or elsewhere.

In addition, six adults were injured, Duran said.

"Without a doubt this is the worst disaster we've had," Bours told CNN.

The president arrived with Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont and Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova to get firsthand updates from doctors and investigators, the state news agency Notimex reported.

Calderon ordered the nation's attorney general to investigate the blaze.

Most of the victims died from smoke inhalation and not burns, Bours said. But the fire was enough for the roof to collapse, he added.

At the time of the blaze, 142 children were inside the ABC Day Care. The day care is for children ages 2 to 4, but Bours confirmed that children even younger were among the victims.

All the children at the day care had been accounted for by Saturday evening, Bours said.

A severely burned 3-year-old girl arrived Saturday at the Sacramento hospital -- where pediatric burn treatment is a specialty -- and was in critical condition, according to Dr. Tina Palmieri, assistant chief of the burn unit.

The child was burned over 80 percent of her body, the doctor told reporters. She said the hospital normally can save just over half of the children with burns that severe.

In Hermosillo, a large crowd gathered outside of the emergency entrance of the city's general hospital and many people consoled each other, video from the scene showed.

"They told me that this happened in a matter of five minutes," Hermosillo Mayor Ernesto Gandara told reporters after surveying the scene.

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

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Posted: 06 June 2009 0915 hrs

Police guard the zone around a daycare centre where at least 29 children died in a fire in Hermosillo, Mexico.

MEXICO CITY: At least 29 children died, including many who were asphyxiated after a fire raced through a daycare centre in the northwestern Mexican border state of Sonora, local police said on Friday.

"We're still bringing bodies out," a spokesman for the local prosecutor's office, Jose Larrinaga, said shortly beforehand.

Radio reports said there were many newborn babies in part of the centre where the fire caused the roof to collapse.

Local media reported that 176 children had been in the ABC daycare centre when the fire broke out at around 3:00pm (2000 GMT) in state capital Hermosillo.

State investigators rushed to the scene, following firefighters, Red Cross workers and police, according to the police statement.

Local press said that city residents also helped out in the face of the rapidly growing disaster.

The origin of the blaze was unclear early Friday evening.

Local media suggested it had started in a neighbouring tire shop, a claim the owners rapidly denied, according to news reports.

Medics transferred five children who had been identified by their parents to Sonora State children's hospital, a medical worker told AFP.

At least 30 children with serious burns were transferred overnight to a specialised hospital across the border in Arizona, according to El Imparcial daily.

The daycare centre belonged to Mexico's social security network, the Mexican presidency said in a statement which expressed President Felipe Calderon's "profound pain".

Calderon called on the national social security director, Daniel Karam Toumeh, to personally visit families and injured children at the scene, it added.

The federal government sent three air ambulances and more than a dozen specialised doctors to the scene, the statement said.

State Governor Eduardo Bours was in Arizona when the fire broke out and travelled to Hermosillo in the evening.

- AFP/so

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

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To prepare for a pandemic is to prepare for surprises

05:55 AM May 12, 2009

AS THE Influenza A (H1N1) outbreak backstory seeps out, there are some vitally important lessons that can be learned. Huge investment in pandemic preparedness and contingency plans, improvements in surveillance and response systems and stockpiling of drugs and vaccines have followed recent avian influenza outbreaks. But do we have effective global disease surveillance and control systems that can prevent a disaster?

In the face of a potential pandemic, huge numbers of potential deaths are bandied about, based on highly suspect data and assumptions and resulting in wild speculation and panic. The counter move is to keep quiet, cover up and assure the populace. Neither approach helps, as we don't know what will happen, when and to whom. This acceptance of uncertainty and ignorance in a public debate is tough. But it is also vital. Otherwise, inappropriate public policy arises and misguided signals are given.

Preparing for a pandemic means preparing for surprises - and being ready to respond rapidly and flexibly under conditions of uncertainty requires a new set of skills, bureaucratic routines and incentive systems in the public agencies charged with protecting the world from emerging infectious diseases.

As Emery Roe and Paul Schulman argue in their recent book High Reliability Management, reliability must be a feature of any system operating in a complex, uncertain world. This requires, they argue, high reliability professionals who can track between local understandings of what is happening on the ground and the broader policy situation, liaising between agencies and across scales.

These professionals are currently absent from the international effort - creating a vacuum at the heart of the response - because authoritative knowledge consists of accepted expertise that does not acknowledge uncertainty, ignorance or complexity.

In a potentially global pandemic situation, global assessments are also based on global statistics, but in reality major structural inequalities affect the likely outcomes of rapid disease spread. We don't know why disease virulence and mortalities are high in Mexico, but apparently lower elsewhere. This may have a complex medical, viral cause. But it also may be to do with access to healthcare and effectiveness of response.

The swine flu story is also revealing how poor surveillance and reporting systems mean an outbreak can quickly get out of control - there were big gaps in detection and reporting that date back to February. But local people knew of the disease, and have strong hypotheses about its origins. Anselma Amador from La Gloria, the village where the first known case of swine flu occurred told The Guardian: "We are not doctors, but it is hard for us not to think the pig farms around here don't have something to do with it ... The flu has pig material in it and we are humans, not pigs."

These explanations are dismissed by the health minister and pig farming company, but why are such leads not being followed up? And why are such early-warning approaches, based on local knowledge about disease incidence and its dynamics, not part of the standard surveillance system?

In South-east Asia local understandings of avian flu and its spread have been vitally important. Medical doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, veterinarians and other specialists need to work hand in hand with local people for surveillance to be effective.

Another strong lesson from the avian flu experience is that attention to the changing structure of the livestock industry is essential to understanding how diseases emerge and spread. While it is easy to blame big agribusiness and industrial farming techniques, the situation is more complex.

While the "livestock revolution" is celebrated as a source of economic growth in the developing world, rapid restructuring of the livestock sector has major downsides and implications for how industries are regulated and diseases managed. As the details begin to emerge on the swine flu outbreaks, a more comprehensive assessment of the political economy of agriculture - and the pig industry in particular - in Mexico will be essential in learning lessons for the future.

Right now, of course, the spotlight is focused on the international public health response. Preparing for a pandemic means preparing for surprises - and being ready to respond rapidly and flexibly under conditions of uncertainty. As the experience with avian influenza has shown, this may require more than simply the top-down, "active and aggressive" technocratic responses being urged. The Guardian

From TODAY, Comments – Tuesday, 12-May-2009

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