The Swine Flu Scare

Fears of a Major Pandemic.

When in February 1976 swine flu was first identified as the agent responsible for a small outbreak of respiratory disease among recruits at Fort Dix, New Jersey, there was ample cause for concern. Hsw 1 N 1, the swine flu virus, was the cause of the pandemic of 1918, which killed twenty million people worldwide and five hundred thousand in the United States. Since the late 1920s the strain could be found only in pigs; no human being under age fifty could have built up antibodies to it. This meant that what might (or might not) be a virulent human flu virus had acquired a new outer coat of antigenic proteins that might (or might not) make it very contagious to humans. The federal government's Centers for Disease Control recommended a major effort to produce a vaccine against the new strain.

President Ford's Decision.

In March President Gerald Ford announced an unprecedented...

[The entire page is 498 words long]

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