Word: swine
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...which the conventiongoers had stayed revealed no outbreak of the mysterious illness among employees who had come in contact with the Legionnaires. The investigators could find no evidence that any of the victims had been exposed to pigs, which have been implicated as the animal reservoir for the swine-flu virus. Nor could the disease detectives explain another apparent contradiction: why some people developed the disease, while others, who ate the same meals, drank the same drinks or shared their rooms during the convention, did not. "This is an amazing disease," said Dr. Robert Gens, director of Pennsylvania...
...first suspects to be screened-because potentially most worrisome on a national scale-was swine flu, a seemingly virulent form of influenza that first surfaced last winter at Fort Dix, N.J., where it infected about a dozen soldiers and killed one. Swine flu may also be related to the flu that killed over half a million Americans in 1918-19 (see box). Some felt that the rapid onset of the Legionnaires' disease was typical of flu. Others thought that the appearance of a condition similar to viral pneumonia, which can also be a result of influenza, was a convincing...
...that the tests would show that the villain was indeed an influenza virus, since at least some vaccines against flu were already available for use. But it was not to be so simple a case. After reviewing the results of their first set of tests, scientists ruled out swine flu or any flu as a suspect...
Seed Viruses. The doubts have been magnified by the fact that not a single new case of swine flu has been found since the strain (ominously similar to the 1918-19 virus) was identified in several hundred G.I.s at Fort Dix, N.J., earlier this year. Even Dr. Edwin D. Kilbourne of New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine, a leading proponent of the Ford program, concedes that the Fort Dix outbreak could have been a "freak occurrence." Complicating matters further, the vaccine, grown in fertilized eggs from "seed" viruses developed in Kilbourne's lab, has been only...
Government health officials clearly agree. They note that the last major new flu strain-Hong Kong A-caused some 30,000 deaths when it appeared in the U.S. in 1968-69, and they hope to start giving swine-flu shots Sept...