The Festival del Cinco de Mayo has caught the flu too.
Event organizers have suspended Sunday's celebration of the Mexican holiday in Flushing Meadows Park --one of the city's largest -- according to reports. About 850,000 people were expected to attend, but event organizers were worried about the potential for spreading swine flu, WCBSTV.com reported.
"We cannot control the crowd," organizer Carmelo Maceda told the station. "We don't know how many people fly in from Mexico or they just went to Mexico. That's why we don't want to take that risk."
Maceda said that city officials had not requested that they cancel the event. But since the the park is near PS 177 and St. Francis Prep, the locus of several suspected swine flu cases in the city, organizers said they didn't want to take any chances.
