Flu threat from the Far East
A major wave of influenza is approaching. What happens next is anybody鈥檚 guess, but many experts are keeping their lips sealed and their fingers crossed.
This epidemic started in Hong Kong in mid-April. It has since reached India, and an increasing number of cases are being reported from Bombay and Madras. The Philippines has 150,000 cases, and outbreaks have now been reported in North Borneo, Sarawak, Formosa, Cambodia, Malaya and Indonesia. Recently a ship that reached Rotterdam from Jakarta reported 300 cases of influenza during the course of the voyage. There have also been cases among aircraft passengers reaching Australia via Singapore. Modern aircraft, as we are discovering, speed the spread of old-fashioned viruses.
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That鈥檚 if it is an old-fashioned virus. It may, of course, be a new-fashioned one. The World Health Organization has been working with samples of the virus, and it seems that it is a very different strain of the influenza A-type virus, the strain that usually causes the major epidemics. Its rapid spread is probably down to the fact that nobody has acquired immunity to it yet. Virus type A has been studied for 10 years and there have been big changes in it since then.
This version seems to be fairly mild and has so far caused few deaths. But we should not feel complacent. There is no vaccine against this new strain and, more pertinently, it would be quite impossible to produce one at such short notice.
While it seems very unlikely indeed that we shall have anything like the desperate pandemic caused by the deadly influenza virus of 1918-19, we should regard this latest outbreak as a sign that influenza viruses can mutate spontaneously, and, when they do, forming a new and deadly strain, there is very little at the present time that we can do about it.
From The New 杏吧原创, 6 June 1957