the subgroup. Then he reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization in Geneva. W.H.O. published the important news alongside reports of a similar outbreak in Hong Kong, where about 15-20% of the population had become ill.
As soon as the London doctors received the package of throat samples, doctors began the standard tests. They found that by reproducing itself with very high speed, the virus had grown more than a million times within two days. Continuing their careful tests, the doctors checked the effect of drugs against all the known subgroups of virus type A. none of them gave any protection. This, then, was something new, a new influenza virus, against which the people of the world had no help whatever.
Having found the virus they were working with, the two doctors now dropped it into the noses of some specially selected animals, which get influenza much as human beings do. In a short time the usual signs of the disease appeared. These experiments proved that the new virus was easy to catch, but that it was not a killer. Scientists, like the general public, call it simply Asian flu.
The first discovery of the virus, however, was made in China before the disease had appeared in other countries. Various reports showed that the influenza outbreak started in China, probably in February of 1957. by the middle of March it had spread all over China. |
