Posts Tagged ‘swine flu’

Swine flu (AH1N1) continues to plague Latin America despite early hopes that the crisis had already peaked, the Ministry of Health (MINSAL) said last Tuesday. There are 11,860 confirmed cases of AH1N1 in Chile, including 1,022 deemed serious. The virus has already claimed the lives of 96 people in Chile.

In mid July Health Undersecretary Jeanette Vega predicted a drop in the incidence of swine flu. At the time there were 40 deaths out of 10,900 confirmed cases.

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Swine flu levels are expected to begin moving down as Chile ends its first winter month, Health Undersecretary Jeanette Vega recently said over the weekend.

“There has been a clear drop (in cases) in the Metropolitan area and in the south, but no improvement in the north,” Vega said. “But we hope to see a drop in the levels of new cases.”

Chile has suffered less under the new disease than many places around the world, explained Vega, noting that country’s flu “data is still quite good compared with international data.”

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Today was our last day of ILP, and they surprised us with an army's supply of empanadas.

So a few things, and the first and probably most important content of this post are the results of my trip to the doc. Details to come, but the crux of it is: I do not have pneumonia, I do not have bronchitis, I do not have swine flu. What I have is nothing new, just a particularly enflamed pair of lungs afflicted with asthma, and the mixed bag that goes with that. More later.

But on to more interesting things. I spoke a bit before about the notion of “modismos,” of slangy parts of speech that we’re surrounded with. Some we’re being taught to fit in and be able to understand, and others people are starting to pick up on their own, chief among them being the dropping of “s” sounds. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why it set me off so much, why it bothered me much more than it should, until I realized the truth: I’m a word and language snob, even (especially) in English. And while I’ll drop a “brb” as quick as the next gargoyle, I’ve tried to make a strict rule of never contracting my speech so much that it makes my sentences hard to read. At times that takes the form of using punctuation for things like facebook messages or texts, and never writing a sentence like “what r u doing?” Call me an elitist if you want, I can take it. I just never saw the point of doing anything that would make compromise my ability to communicate clearly. (more…)