Students rethink plans for traveling in swine flu's wake

Carlos Beltran, a first-year-business student at Michigan State University, is worried about H1N1 flu -- but not in Michigan where the illnesses have been few and mild. The Mexico City native has been trying to keep up with friends and family in his nation's capital, which was hard-hit by the novel virus.

"No one was concerned at first," he said. Then the Mexican government shut schools and businesses and told people to stay at home. The metropolis of 20 million became a ghost town for a while, he said.

Since the first public reports of swine flu in Mexico surfaced in late April, 44 people with flu-like symptoms have died and at least 1,204 have fallen ill. An early spate of deaths fueled belief it was particularly deadly, and U.S. health officials prepared for a pandemic.

H1N1 hasn't been as deadly in the United States, but health officials say not to assume swine flu is over. Consequently, people in Michigan with ties to Mexico are reconsidering travel plans.

In spite of the distance between him and the worst of swine flu, Beltran is feeling its wrath. The business school is leaving for China on Tuesday, and the 28-year-old said he isn't going, for fear of being quarantined. China recently quarantined, then released, several people from Mexico.

In Monterrey, Mexico, Priscila Martinez said, her grandparents "don't take precautions like they should." The 19-year-old and her mother left Mexico for Canton when she was 11. Now at the University of Michigan, the junior political science major said she didn't know what flu was until she came to the United States.

"We don't get vaccines," she said. "We don't talk about it."

David Hayes-Bautista, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies Latino health issues, said illnesses like flu are top-10 killers in Mexico. It's a perception problem, he said.

Former Mexican minister of health Julio Frenk said recently that about 10,000 people die of flu complications each year in Mexico, making its death rate slightly less than in the United States, where 36,000 of the 306 million Americans die each year.

Even with what has been learned since the outbreak began, Victoria Pardo , a 22-year-old math major from Dearborn at Wayne State University, still is rethinking her August trip to Chihuahua, a border state where the third-generation Mexican American has been a missionary.

"The thought of even being there worries me and my family," she said.