Word: a2
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley was just recovering from it. In Hollywood, Actress Natalie Wood was felled by it while shooting a $3,000,000 film. In Seattle, a pair of twin baby orangutans were placed in isolation when they came down with its symptoms. With jet-age speed A2-Hong Kong-68, more commonly known as "Hong Kong flu," spanned the nation last week, respecting neither station nor species...
...best-documented mutation occurred in 1957, when a new and savage strain poured out of northern China and won deserved ill repute as "Asian A2." Whenever a virus mutates, pharmaceutical manufacturers have to in corporate the new strain into their vaccines because antibodies and therefore immunity against older strains are not as effective in combatting the successive mutants. That takes many months at best, and the makers lost the race to the virus in the winter...
Last July, another mutation erupted from China through Hong Kong and has been tagged A2-Hong Kong-68. This time the vaccine makers were able to work faster. In mid-November they announced Government approval and first shipments of a new, anti-Hong-Kong-flu vaccine, harvested from viruses grown in eggs, inactivated, then tested for potency and safety...
Public Health Service officials predict that the new flu, a variant of the A-2 that triggered a global epidemic in 1957 and killed 19,000, will cause, in healthy victims, illnesses similar to those resulting from earlier strains of A2. Average severity: two to five days of aches, pains and fever. For the elderly and infirm, however, A-2/Hong Kong/68 poses a threat to life. With this in mind, PHS experts have advised physicians to give inoculations of either old or new vaccine only to persons who run the risk of severe complications when they come down with...
...question facing health officials now: how effective will available vaccines be against this year's A2? Flu viruses have the exasperating capability to "drift" each year, changing characteristics to varying degrees and accreting new "armor" against existing vaccines. So far, the virus "drift" does not appear significant. "Present influenza vaccines," says the Communicable Disease Center's Dr. Stephen Schoenbaum, "should afford adequate protection since they contain A-2 strains similar to the ones we have isolated...