The government has announced the first swine flu fatality outside Mexico, a two-year-old child in Texas. Drudge, needless to say, is reporting this news with the sense of decorum and responsibility he is so rightly famous for.



Having gotten suitably excited about Typhoid Maria, we can now move on to the discovery of patient zero.

Five-year-old Edgar Hernandez survived the earliest documented case of swine flu in an outbreak that has spread across four continents.

His family lives in the 3,000-person village of La Gloria in the state of Veracruz, where a flu outbreak was reported on April 2.

Lab tests confirmed that Edgar was the only patient in Veracruz to test positive for the swine flu virus; the others had contracted a common flu. Health officials had returned to Edgar's sample only after cases of the new flu strain were spotted around the country.

...Edgar has recovered and playfully credits ice cream for helping him feel better.

He can have his ice cream after he tells us who helped him engineer the virus.

Steven "Freakonomics" Levitt has a nice follow-up post in response to the kneejerk paroxysm of baseless fear generated in response to his original terrorism post, which I linked to yesterday. In it he reiterates the same reasonable and essential point, which will surely again be ignored by the mob:

A lot of the angry responses make me wonder what everyday Americans think terrorists do all day. My guess is that they brainstorm ideas for terrorist plots. And you have to believe that terrorists are total idiots if it never occurred to them after the Washington, D.C., sniper shootings that maybe a sniper plot wasn’t a bad idea. The point is this: there is a virtually infinite array of incredibly simple strategies available to terrorists. The fact that it has been six years since the last major terrorist attack in the United States suggests either that the terrorists are incompetent, or that perhaps their goal isn’t really to generate terror.