Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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's bureau...
...determine if influenza was the killer, the researchers took solutions made from tissues taken from disease victims and injected them into three kinds of cultures-chick embryos, human and monkey cells, and live mice. The viruses would indicate their presence by killing the living cells and by killing or infecting the mice. They would reveal their existence in the chicks indirectly. Fluid from the infected chick eggs was mixed with samples of normal animal blood to see if the embryonic cells would agglutinate, or "clump" together; if they did, it would mean that a virus was present...
Some doctors hoped, in a way, 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...
Although the virus' incubation period is about two days, there were reports, still unexplained, of outbreaks beginning aboard ships that had been at sea for three weeks or more. Four years of war had left much of the world ripe for all sorts of epidemics, and many varieties of pneumonia-causing bacteria were pullulating. So was Pfeiffer's bacillus, which had been mistakenly identified in 1892-93 as the cause of influenza and therefore named Hemophilus influenzae. There is no doubt that among the millions who fell prey to the virus, many were simultaneously attacked by this...
Then, as mysteriously as it had appeared, this strain of virus disappeared, or at least went underground. Apparently, perhaps with some minor mutation, it found its refuge among hogs -hence the appellation of "swine flu" given to the recent emergence of a similar flu strain at Fort...