Word: a2
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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...
...A2 strain, a biological brother to a similar virus dubbed "Asian flu" when it affected 20 million in the U.S. in 1957, turned up last July in Central China. Travelers quickly carried it to Hong Kong, where it was labeled "Mao flu" as 500,000 Crown Colony residents were infected. The worldwide epidemic had begun (TIME, Sept. 27). The flu spread to Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand, where King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit were among those affected. Authorities in the Soviet Union started vaccinating between 50% and 70% of Russia's urban population...
...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...