Have there been previous swine flu oubtreaks?
Yes. There was a swine flu outbreak at Fort Dix, N.J., in 1976 among military recruits. It lasted about a month and then went away as mysteriously as it appeared. As many as 240 people were infected; one died. The swine flu that spread at Fort Dix was the H1N1 strain. That’s the same flu strain that caused the disastrous flu pandemic of 1918-1919, resulting in tens of millions of deaths worldwide. Concern that a new H1N1 pandemic might return in winter 1976 led to a crash program to create a vaccine and vaccinate all Americans against swine flu. That vaccine program ran into all kinds of problems — not the least of which was public perception that the vaccine caused excessive rates of dangerous reactions. That may not have been the case. But after more than 40 million people were vaccinated, the effort was abandoned. As it turned out, there was no swine flu epidemic. Even though it’s an H1N1 type A flu bug, the new swine flu is a different virus than the ones that emerged in 1918 and
