'World gripped by flu pandemic': lessons from 50 years ago

0 Comments | AFP, February, 2007

PARIS (AFP) — "A major wave of influenza is approaching from the Far East," an article published almost 50 years ago in the British journal New Scientist began ominously.

The experts, it said, were "keeping their lips sealed and their fingers crossed."

But neither silence nor prayer could prevent the 20th century's second major flu pandemic from sweeping across the globe.

By the spring of 1958, what came to be known as Asian flu had claimed two million lives and reminded scientists how little they really knew about one of Man's most lethal, mutating predators.

Even today, half a century later, there are lessons to be gleaned from that outbreak as the world warily eyes H5N1 bird flu, wondering if -- or when -- it will mutate into a form that spreads...