The symptoms seemed to extend from coast to coast—sore throat, a cough,
runny nose, varying degrees of fever—and there were sensationalized
press reports of a “deadly threat to the elderly'' and a “nationwide epidemic.” Thousands of Americans, mostly in the Eastern states, were down last
week with something loosely described as flu. The U.S. Public Health
Service, on guard against a new epidemic of the Asian flu, which first
appeared in 1957, renewed its standard warning to groups of vulnerable
people—pregnant women, patients who already have heart or lung
disease, and the elderly—to get flu shots. Among children, much of the
illness was of an old type, though one so recently distinguished from
other diseases by medical scientists that it is not yet listed in the
standard medical texts or dictionaries: parainfluenza. The same disease
is also suspected in some adult illnesses. Spotty by Cities. The geographic spottiness of the outbreaks confused
public health authorities, and laboratory workers had the tedious job
of identifying submicroscopic viruses in the laboratory to decide
which of them were responsible for a particular patient's illness. The
Asian A-2 strain of influenza virus has been identified in enough
cases to convict it as the chief culprit in North Carolina's heavy
outbreak of flu in January. The virus apparently spread to adjacent
Virginia and South Carolina, and the University of Georgia had a local
incident. Farther west, there were confirmed outbreaks at Great Lakes
Naval Training Center in Illinois, at the University of Michigan, and
in Kansas. Maryland has had heavy absenteeism in schools and colleges; more than
300 of Baltimore's 3,740 policemen did not show up for duty. But
Philadelphia, only 100 miles away, seemed to have nothing worse than
the usual winter run of colds and grippe, with negligible absenteeism
and no known cases of Asian flu. In New York City, thousands of adults complained of flu—some of them
rightly so, said the city health department after the presence of Asian
virus had been confirmed. More than 100 children in one institution
were affected. Predictably, some patients, who were already weak when
the flu struck them down, contracted a second infection and
pneumonia. As a result, the city's death rate rose, but not nearly as
much as it had in the flu epidemics of 1957-58 and 1960. Partial Immunity. Most alarming to many doctors was a New York City
outbreak of bronchiolitis and viral pneumonia among children. Some
hospitals reported them twice as prevalent as ever before. And for this
the Asian A-2 virus was not to blame. In many cases, the guilty
microbe was one of the parainfluenza viruses. There are three such viruses, distinguished by numbers.* Parainfluenza
1 was first called Sendai virus, after the Japanese city where it was
originally isolated. It is close enough kin to the true flu viruses to
have once been called influenza D. It has now been found around the
world. At one time or another, nearly every child in the U.S. gets
infected with paraflu 1, and the illness is most likely to be severe in
the very young. The resulting antibody may last a lifetime, but gives
only partial immunity: an adult can be reinfected with the same virus,
though he may get nothing worse than a cold.
