Patient Zero: "I Feel Good"

A counterweight, perhaps, to this morning's sad news that a child has died in Texas from swine flu: “I feel good,” says five-year-old Édgar Enrique Hernández, who has been identified as the earliest confirmed case of swine flu in Mexico. He first showed symptoms on April 1, and Canadian researches confirmed the results on April 23. Edgar lives in La Gloria, a village of about 2,500 people in the state of Veracruz surrounded by pig-breeding farms, where hundreds of people fell ill in late March and early April in an unexplained outbreak that left two children dead and prompted authorities to fumigate the entire village. According to Edgar’s mother, he was not the first to fall ill. “Why did the other children not have it and my child did? He was one of the last to get sick,” she said. “I feel terrible about all of this, because the people are thinking that this was all my son's fault. I don't think this is anyone's fault.”