MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Authorities are investigating the deaths of two U.S. citizens for allegedly contracting fungal meningitis, including at two medical surgery clinics in Matamoros, the Mexican border city with the United States.
A spokesman for the US embassy in Mexico confirmed on Thursday that two of its citizens had died, without specifying when or where the deaths occurred.
“Yes, it is the contamination that caused these deaths and the whole problem is being carried out,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said earlier when asked about the cause.
The president stated that “contaminated medicine used as anesthesia for plastic surgeons” could be the cause of the riot and added that the centers where the alleged outbreaks are private and in them “there are regulations, but they did not appear; in all cases”.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States (CDC, for the acronym in English) released a report on Wednesday that 224 people were exposed to the fungus who could not recover from the disease after two treatments in Matamoros. .
The report states that 206 of them do not show symptoms, nine are suspected cases and nine others are probable. In addition, it means that “two cases of deceased patients are likely to be indicated.”
The Secretary of Health of Tamaulipas, Vicente Joel Hernández, told the local television channel Milenio on Thursday in Mexico that there are five confirmed cases and five are suspected.
In February, the Mexican police detained a doctor and two people involved in the spread of a mysterious outbreak of Meningitis in the state of Durango, also in the northern region, which left at least 35 people dead.
