Two arrested for selling expensive flu masks in Mexico City

by Amy Judd | April 25, 2009 at 03:57 pm
251 views | 36 Recommendations | 4 comments

Two people have been arrested in Mexico City today for selling flu masks on the street for 25 times their regular price. Surgical masks are a hot ticket item right now as people try to cover their faces from the deadly swine flu outbreak.

A 35 year-old woman and her 15 year-old brother tried to sell 1,000 face masks outside a subway station and near a hospital for 50 pesos each, which is about $4 US.

In pharmacies they are sold for about two pesos each in packs, but so many have sold out since the swine flu outbreak killed about 68 people in Mexico.

"They'd managed to sell a few, but we received a complaint and we took them before a judge," Reforma's online edition quoted a police spokesman as saying.

Many people in Mexico City are not even going out of their homes and are instead staying at home and trying to not come in to contact with people.

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Blue Crush

How mean! 

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jazzyzazzy

Aye some chancer out there.make money out of anything.even misery.

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Roy C

I could be wrong about this now, but when I took a course in microbiology that was an actual medical micro class with med students, they told us that the surgical mask did nothing.

Yes, for about 5 minutes, it keeps your spit and phlegm from coming out into the air, but, after 5 minutes or so, the mask is saturated and you begin to put out your bacteria.

Now, as for keeping you from inhaling crap, I don't think it does anything. It was kind of a joke to see people running around with these masks on as if the mask was going to do something.

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Roy C

The mask might help you if the person is infected and unable to wear a mask himself.

Do Surgical Masks Stop SARS?By Jon Cohen

The dramatic photos of surgical-masked people walking the streets of Asian cities hit by severe acute respiratory syndrome pose the question: Do the masks offer them any meaningful protection against the disease?

Viruses, including the coronavirus that scientists believe may be the cause of SARS, are so tiny that they can easily pass through such barriers. Several studies even have shown that surgical masks fail to prevent transmission of the much larger mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes TB. While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that people who have SARS wear these masks, they do not even recommend them for people in contact with those patients unless the infected person can't wear one. Wearing surgical masks outdoors, where virus-laden particles easily disperse, has even less value.

CDC does advise health-care workers working with SARS patients to wear a special mask called an N-95 respirator. But even these masks offer limited protection from coronaviruses. The name of the mask says it all. The "95" means the mask, if properly fitted—and that "fit factor" presents a big if—can filter out particles down to .3 microns 95 percent of the time. (A human hair is roughly 100 microns in diameter.) Human coronaviruses measure between .1 and .2 microns, which is one to two times below the cutoff.

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Blue Crush
First Flagged at 4:29 PM, Apr 25, 2009 by Blue Crush

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