Last night World Health Organization (WHO) branded the new Mexican flu virus a potential pandemic. Seven years after the SARS outbreak in Southeast Asia, the modern world is again proving remarkably vulnerable to the spread of serious diseases. Already at least 60 Mexicans have died and over a thousand are believed infected, some of them across the border in the United States.

For the Americans indeed the situation is made more serious because standard cross-border checks are unlikely to control the movement of infected individuals. Despite strong security measures, the US-Mexican border remains remarkably porous with a steady stream of poor Mexicans making the overland border crossing as illegal immigrants.

Mexico may seem a long way away from the Kingdom, but such is the nature of international travel that this new flu virus could already have reached any part of the world. It only needs passengers in transit at any international airport to meet an infected traveler from Mexico for the condition to be passed on. It is the nature of most such viruses that not everyone who carries them displays any warning symptoms.

WHO officials were saying yesterday that the Mexican virus was not as dangerous as the H5N1 bird flu that erupted in Asia around five years ago. They also claim that it is a minor variant of a known virus, unlike H5N1 that has the devastating capacity to keep changing itself, thus removing any possibility of creating a vaccine that is sure to protect people.

In one form or another the flu virus is active at all times. As a general rule, half a million people die from it each year. Normally they are mostly the elderly, the sick or vulnerable infants. Nevertheless, the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak is widely believed to have killed at least twice the 37 million people who died during World War I. Normally, however, most healthy people who become infected with any type of influenza may pass a few miserable days but their systems can fight off the bug. Even so, with more virulent strains, it is obvious that much higher precautions need to be taken, both by authorities around the world and by families and individuals.

Unfortunately pandemics, such as the Mexican outbreak may have consequences beyond the actual illness itself. In Southeast Asia, the economic damage, especially for tourism ran into billions of dollars. Mexico is likely to suffer similar losses as governments warn their citizens of the danger of holidaying in popular Mexican resorts. Recession- hit Mexico is ill placed to stand a massive drop in such income.

Then there is the reprehensible consequence of profiteering. The price of pharmaceuticals that the anxious might buy to protect their families, is likely to rocket as unscrupulous middlemen seek to corner supplies. Even protective face masks were at a premium in Asia. The epidemics do not just bring out fevers, but all too often the worst in people as well.

Jacob Zuma: S. African enigma

About the best thing that can be said about Jacob Zuma’s ascendance is that if he fails as spectacularly as many outsiders expect, it could pave the way for a more robust opposition and an end to one-party rule in a country where new ideas are badly needed, said Los Angeles Times in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:

Zuma, the man destined to become South Africa’s president after his African National Congress party swept national elections this week, is a polygamist, a former communist revolutionary with little formal education, an alleged taker of lavish bribes and a man so stunningly clueless about his nation’s No. 1 public health threat that he once declared his belief that he could fend off HIV by showering after sex. Needless to say, he makes many foreign observers very nervous.

Zuma is in many ways a contradiction and an enigma, but then, from an American point of view, so is his country. South Africa is a beacon of democracy and economic strength on a continent sadly lacking in either. Its comparatively peaceful transition from white minority rule to free elections, and the remarkable truth-and-reconciliation process it pioneered, set an example for the rest of the world. And yet it has consistently tried to block United Nations sanctions against such human rights abusers as Sudan and Myanmar. Johannesburg’s failure to exert its considerable regional influence over Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe allowed him to turn his country from a breadbasket into a nearly failed state. And although South Africa’s economy grew steadily after the end of apartheid, it still has among the widest disparities in wealth in the world, along with a soaring murder rate and a raging AIDS epidemic. Will Zuma solve any of those problems or make South Africa a more responsible player on the world stage? Who knows? The freedom fighter who spent years in prison with national hero Nelson Mandela is a political cipher.

A leftist who promises to improve the lot of the poor, he nonetheless assures the rich that he won’t raise their taxes in an attempt to redistribute wealth. He has been critical of his predecessor’s coddling of Mugabe yet sees Western attempts to intervene as colonialist meddling.