By Michael Soltys, Buenos Aires Herald Senior Editor.

City Mayor Mauricio Macri is not known to harbour any affection towards the Kirchners but he has now thrown them a lifeline twice in three months. Back in March he brought forward the City elections, which gave the presidential couple the perfect excuse to advance the midterm Congress elections from late October to last Sunday, thus averting the full consequences of a presumably advancing economic crisis (although not political disaster, as we have just seen).

And now Macri (apparently flustered by swine flu symptoms among his own Cabinet after downplaying the scare during the election weekend) has just declared a health emergency in this city, thus enabling the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration to change the subject rapidly from its embarrassing electoral defeat. Which is not to say either that swine flu should not be taken seriously (with over 40 dead and more than 15,000 infected) or that Macri is the only person doing so - classes will be suspended between July 6 and August 3 in Buenos Aires province as much as in this city with classes also affected in 15 provinces.

The new month began yesterday with a new minister to confront this health emergency (yet to be declared at national level) - Tucumán Lieutenant-Governor Juan Luis Manzur replacing Graciela Ocaña. Any new official should be given the benefit of the doubt and in Manzur's case there are some concrete reasons to extend it - not only is Manzur a member of the medical profession (unlike Ocaña, who was always more interested in fighting health care graft than improving public health) but he is a nutritional expert and nutrition has far more to do with influenza mortality than commonly realized (thus Spanish flu would never have claimed 20 million lives nine decades ago without the starvation rations prevailing in Central and Eastern Europe by the end of the First World War and indeed an eminent scientist telephoned this newsroom to urge the government to subsidize the reduction of meat, dairy produce and fresh vegetable prices by 30-50 percent as an emergency measure).

Having said this, government action against swine flu thus far has been stopgap and riddled with double standards - why schools and not soccer matches or shows? As usual, the people are ahead of its government and shunning restaurants in droves, for example. Indeed the potential negative economic consequences are enormous - e.g. tourism and what happens to the Palermo Rural Society show? - and while the concern for human life must remain paramount, there are problems at every level to resolve.