可以說, 因為[死亡之吻] ！
www.reuters.com全文
By Maggie Fox
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Normally a pre-dawn call with the offer of a scoop gets a journalist's adrenaline pumping. I had always laughed at how we run toward things everyone else runs away from -- car bombs, riots, disease outbreaks.
But this was sad and unwelcome news.
I had a two-hour beat on my competitors with news a toddler had become the first person in the United States to die of the new flu that had already killed people in Mexico. And I had two hours to get my eight-year-old daughter to school.
Her school, with a bilingual curriculum, has close ties to Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak.
I had two hours to worry about whether I was putting my child in harm's way by simply taking her to school.
I typed out the news alert on my laptop while my daughter brushed her teeth; buttered toast for breakfast while coordinating with colleagues on my cellphone.
There is a very small and intimate community of journalists who follow flu -- most of us date back to the early days of the outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza, first in Hong Kong in 1997 and later, after its resurgence in 2003.
We have all heard the dire scenarios -- predictions of widespread economic unrest, 40-percent absence rates from work, interruptions in transportation and supply chains. We've written countless times about when schools should be closed.
For more than a week already I had been asking detailed questions about this new strain of H1N1 swine flu, first identified in children in southern California and Texas. Why was it killing people in Mexico but, seemingly, nowhere else?
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As I dropped my daughter off that morning, she rushed to embrace her best friend. The friend's mother was chatting about their recent trip -- yes, to Cancun, in Mexico.
Would I succumb to the instincts that drive discrimination? I was relieved to be able to calmly join the other parents -- one a pediatrician -- as they discussed incubation periods for influenza and agreed that any child who had not already been sick was unlikely to be infectious at this point.
I kissed my daughter goodbye, reminded her to use hand sanitizer, and headed to work. There, I sprayed Lysol on my desk. You can never be sure.
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