Word: flu
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Isolated groups of men in Spitsbergen and Greenland, Burnet points out, generally withstand the arctic winter without illness but summer's first ship brings a violent epidemic of colds. Doctors think that vulnerable victims catch it from carriers who are immune through constant exposure. Even great flu epidemics like the 1918 pandemic, says Burnet, attack only a vulnerable minority of the population. And most flu epidemics quickly run their course, leaving the population immune, at least temporarily, to another epidemic...
Once Preacher Coffin collapsed in the pulpit with intestinal flu, causing a flurry of transpacific cables when the incident was reported in the New York Times. Once an attack of dysentery forced him to hand over his lecture script to his wife. But by & large, Dr. Coffin thinks his trip went off smoothly...
Most of the flu was type A, ordinarily mild. But this year's A-brand was exceptionally virulent; the death rate from flu and its complications was higher than last year's. There were other peculiarities: the epidemic had struck four times as hard in Texas (81,860 cases) as anywhere else, had followed a comparatively flu-less winter (the season's total-239,637 cases-was less than half that in the 1945-46 epidemic...
Just when it looked as if the danger of flu was safely over, an epidemic struck. Last week the U.S. was in the grip of an unseasonable wave of influenza. Starting early in March, two months after the usual seasonal peak for the disease, the epidemic had risen to some 50,000 cases a week, was still going strong...
What had caused the belated outbreak? U.S. Public Health Service epidemiologists refused even to guess. About flu epidemics they know only one thing: they are always unpredictable...