A New/Old Flu

As reports out of Moscow had it, the Soviet Union was being swept by an epidemic as devastating as any Mongol invasion. At least 40 million Soviet citizens (15% of the population) had been laid low with fever, coughing, headaches, aching bones and a lingering lethargy. By all accounts--none of them officially confirmed, of course--the ultimate ranking victim was Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. When his 71st birthday rolled around last week, Brezhnev, who rarely passes up any opportunity to accept honors or congratulations, was nowhere to be seen. In fact, he had canceled all recent appointments. At his last public appearance, at the Kremlin funeral of a Soviet marshal, he was coughing frequently and made liberal use of his handkerchief.

What has hit the Soviet Union is a microbe that is invisible except to devices like the electron-microscope eye: an influenza virus. It appears to have surfaced first hi Khabarovsk, on the border between Soviet Siberia and Chinese Manchuria. (Soviet sources suggested that it might have originated in Southeast Asia as it has appeared in Hong Kong.) For obscure reasons, the Siberia-Manchuria border and nearby areas are suspected of having been the spawning ground of almost all, if not all, epidemic-causing influenza viruses. This region has been indicted as the birthplace of the notorious A-2 strain of Asian Flu that swept the world in 1957-58. The offspring and collaterals of that virus remain the principal causes of flu outbreaks around the globe.

The new strain currently savaging the Soviet Union, A/USSR/77, is closely similar to an old oldtimer, the A-1 flu, which was the dominant strain from 1947 to 1957. During that period, people in most countries were exposed to this variety and thus acquired some immunity to A1. But all those born after 1957 cannot be expected to have any immunity to A1.

Disease detectives at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, which maintains branches in scores of countries, have received laboratory specimens of the 1977 A-l strain. Several laboratories, including those at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, are testing them for degrees of mutation. New vaccines must be developed. They can probably be put into production soon enough to be ready for use by April.

Many parts of the U.S., notably New Jersey and Pennsylvania, have reported flu outbreaks already. But all the viruses responsible appear to be A/Texas or A/Victoria, both recent mutants against which currently available vaccines are generally (though not totally) effective. It will take some months for the new A-l strain to complete its spread--and spread it almost certainly will, from the frozen stretches of Siberia and Manchuria to Europe and the U.S.

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