The residents of Mexico City face serious problems of air pollution. Identifying the most representative scenarios for the transport and dispersion of air pollutants requires the knowledge of the main wind circulation patterns. In this paper, a simple method to recognize and characterize the wind circulation patterns in a given region is proposed and applied to the Mexico City winds (2001–2006)...

Epidemiologic evidence associates particulate air pollution with cardiopulmonary morbidity and mortality. The biological mechanisms underlying these associations and the relationship between ambient levels and retained particles in the lung remain uncertain. We examined the parenchymal particle content of 11 autopsy lungs from never-smoking female residents of Mexico City, a region with high am...

1. On April 24, 2009 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it had received reports from the United States and Mexico about a new form of swine influenza, Type A (H1N1). Although the confirmed cases in the United States were relatively mild, the reports from Mexico were more alarming. Fifty-nine individuals, most of whom had been young and healthy, were dead in Mexico City alone.1 A...

BACKGROUND Few data are available on the prevalence of hypertension in Mexico. METHODS AND RESULTS We compared the prevalence of mild hypertension (systolic blood pressure > or = 140 mm Hg and/or diastolic blood pressure > or = 90 mm Hg and/or use of antihypertensive medications) in 1500 low-income Mexican Americans who participated in the San Antonio Heart Study and 2280 low-income Mexicans ...

This paper presents estimates of the spectral solar absorption due to atmospheric aerosols during the 2006 MILAGRO/INTEX-B (Megacity Initiative-Local And Global Research Observations/Phase B of the Intercontinental Chemical Transport Experiment) field campaign. The aerosol absorption was derived from measurements of the spectral solar radiation and the spectral aerosol optical depth made on the...

On January 12, 2016, Professor Gastón Guzmán passed away. One can say without a doubt that Latin America has lost its greatest mycologist.* I personally knew Professor Guzmán for many years. He was truly a great man admired by all who came to know him. I had just met with him last August at the Eighth International Medical Mushroom Conference in Manizales, where I had the pleasure of congratula...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the association of 2008-9 seasonal trivalent inactivated vaccine with cases of influenza A/H1N1 during the epidemic in Mexico. DESIGN Frequency matched case-control study. SETTING Specialty hospital in Mexico City, March to May 2009. PARTICIPANTS 60 patients with laboratory confirmed influenza A/H1N1 and 180 controls with other diseases (not influenza-like illness or...

Mexico to monitor remotely the carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbons (HC) and nitric oxide (NO) emissions of the local vehicle fleet. In four days of monitoring at four different locations within the city, 26,534 vehicles passed the sensor. In all more than 24,000 valid measurements were obtained for CO, more than 23,000 for HC and more than 16,000 for NO. Mean values for each species were 1.69% C...

BACKGROUND Factors affecting vulnerability to heat-related mortality are not well understood. Identifying susceptible populations is of particular importance given anticipated rising temperatures from climatic change. METHODS We investigated heat-related mortality for three Latin American cities (Mexico City, Mexico; São Paulo, Brazil; Santiago, Chile) using a case-crossover approach for 754 ...