Battling the 8.7 Degree Peril

TEACAPAN, SINALOA, MEXICO--As proof that Mexican editors are fiddleheaded as others, today’s issue of Noroeste has as its main front page story the news that temperatures here plunged to 8.7 degrees Celsius overnight, endangering the health and even the lives of old people and small children. There is no relief in sight.

For better understanding of those Canadians who haven’t yet adapted to Celsius measurements, 8.7C is about 48 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a common outdoor winter temperature in Vancouver and an average indoor winter temperature in the stately country houses of Great Britain. Somehow the young and the old struggle along up there but down here such cold requires intervention by government agencies, although so far no governor has declared a State of Emergency, something governors everywhere are always eager to do.

The Mazatlan Red Cross told Noroeste reporters that so far 44 people have had respiratory problems; five were adults, seven old people and the rest children, some as young as eight months, poor little innocents. The toll in rural areas is, we may be sure, even higher.

Both at the top of the front page and on an inside page is further medical advice to help the public survive this winter. The front page lists six prudent steps:

1. Wrap up warmly, wear a hat and gloves;

2. To avoid poisoning, do not light fires in houses with the doors closed;

3. Avoid sudden changes of temperature. (The old Finnish custom of leaping out of a sauna and rolling in the snow would never be acceptable or even believable to Mexican doctors.)

4. Take particular care of babies and old people;

5 As far as possible, avoid being on the streets during the night and early morning hours;

6. Eat foods containing vitamin C, such as lemons and oranges, drink a lot of liquids.

The Red Cross advisory on the inside page is similar: “Bundle up well before venturing out of doors, don’t expose yourself to any rapid changes of temperature and if symptoms of illness persist apply immediately at your nearest health centre.”

A few of the older and many of the illiterate Mexicans seem to believe this sort of chatter and here in this rural area men may be seen in the dawn hours with bandannas tied on the bridge of the nose so the fabric, hanging over the nose and mouth, will save them from drawing frigid air directly into their lungs. Many wear several shirts and sweaters at a time. Most Mexicans, however, recognize stories like Noroeste’s as being just more hysterical newspaper yawp and give the crisis the attention it deserves, namely none.

Why is it that newspaper editors and government officials get such a knot in their knickers about nothing?

In part, it is political correctness. Editors create public alarm and politicians recognize that they have a duty to appear to be doing something about what has alarmed the editors or, at the very least saying something, about such matters as eclipses of the sun and moon and variations in the Nino Pacific Ocean current. Their comments reinforce the original scare story. Thus these two societal groups find mutual encouragement. It’s as if fleas could derive nourishment from one another.

Nothing about this phenomenon is special to Mexico.

The story that second-hand smoke causes lung cancer has provided full-time livings and fat pensions to a full generation of Canadian and American public health officials and their attendant newspaper flugelemen. There is no proof that such a threat exists, any more than there is proof that drawing 8.7C degree air straight into the chest chamber will propel you into the pneumonia ward at your friendly neighborhood hospital.

The United Nations sponsored a test of second hand smoke dangers and found nothing of statistical significance. This did not deter any scaremongers in the north and boxcar loads of restrictive laws and regislations have passed in both nations. The secondhand smoke scare never quite caught on in Mexico, but fresh air can. Here there is nothing that saner doctors could tell some of the Mexicans which would disabuse them of the belief that a whiff of fresh air, if it is called a draft, is as great a menace to human health as fighting bulls. And newspapers will service such strange beliefs as readily as sensible ones.

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Decembmer/02