'FLU EPIDEMIC.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 216, 11 September 1940, Page 5

'FLU EPIDEMIC.

EUROPE IN WINTER ? EXPERT'S PREDICTION. An outbreak of influenza in Europe next winter was predicted by the Assist-ant-Director of the Walter and Eliza Institute, Dr. F. M. Burnet, an acknowledged world authority as a result of his researches on influenza, in a lecture in Melbourne recently (reports the "Melbourne "Herald.") Dr. Burnet said that epidemic influenza came in cycles every four or five years, and the next was due in Europe this winter. It was certain to be more severe than usual because, whatever the course of the war, the factors making for the spread and increased severity of infectious disease—inadequate food and shelter, overcrowding and general misery—would be rampant in Europe. There was every danger that the outbreak would take a pandemic form and spread far beyond the war zone. all known infections, pandemic influenza was the greatest danger to which civilised • nations were exposed. Twenty-five million had died in the 1918-19 outbreak, 150,000 in England alone. Research Details. Dr. Burnet described his experiments with the 'flu viris on mice, eggs and ferrets.

He said he had been able to demonstrate that, by cultivation of the virus on chick embryo tissues, its virulence for man could be modified at will, and that the use of a suitably modified strain at a chosen time should be able to confer effective immunity against epidemic influenza. Only man and ferrets were susceptible to influenza. He was working at the National Institute in Hampstead, England, when the discovery was made, and one of his cherished memories was of meeting the famous researcher, Dr. Laidlaw, and being told with elation, /'the ferrets are sneezing." I

Ferrets, however, were too costly and difficult to feed and handle, so other test animals had to be found. It had been found possible to produce influenza of a sort iu mice and unhatched chickens, und he had been working mainly on them since. Historic Plagues. Historical points in Dr. Burnet's lectures were:— The plague of Athens in the fifth century B.C. was, judging from the symptoms mentioned by Thucydides, probably Rocky Mountain fever, not plague. The plague of Justinian (531-580 A.D) and the Black Death (1345) were the only two pestilences in human history whose death roll approached or equalled that of the 1918-19 'flu epidemic. Influenza was described in a letter from the court of Mary Queen of Scots —"It is a plague in their heads that have it and a soreness in their stomachs, with a great cough that remaincth with sonic longer." Noah Webster (of dictionary fame) had his own theory of the disease. He suggested the cause was in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.