I don’t know why I’m posting- patterns I guess - the vaccine had problems, shut it down
Swine flu 1976: Sheffield man's death set off panic
Posted Thursday, April 30, 2009 5:59 am
By Jack Dew, Berkshire Eagle Staff
David Lewis was a 19-year-old private stationed in Fort Dix, N.J., in February 1976 when he came down with the flu. Despite his illness, he joined his platoon on a 50-mile hike. He collapsed 13 miles in and died of pneumonia. An autopsy revealed that he had been infected with swine flu.
"He was a wonderful person," said Lee Watroba, a classmate and friend of Lewis' at Mount Everett, who remembered Lewis when the latest swine flu surfaced. "He was going to go into the ministry, and he was just a much-loved kid."
According to accounts of Lewis' death and its aftermath in The Trentonian of Trenton, N.J., and the online magazine Salon, authorities feared that the swine flu would resemble the 1918 pandemic that killed 22 million people worldwide.
Panic building
Most flus are slight mutations on earlier viruses, but authorities feared that this swine strain could be a new virus set loose among a population that hadn't built an immunity. If it were as infectious as the 1918 swine flu, government officials estimated that 1 million Americans would die.
Just as the panic was building, hundreds of American Legion members attending a convention in Philadelphia contracted a mysterious illness (the cause would later be identified as a bacteria and the illness would come to be known as Legionnaires' disease) that killed an estimated three dozen people.
Vaccine created problems
President Ford pushed for every American to be given a hastily produced vaccine at a cost of $135 million. But when the vaccine seemed to cause problems on its own, it was quickly scrapped. The ensuing flu season proved to a mild one.
In the end, Lewis was the only victim of the small swine flu outbreak; though other soldiers at Fort Dix were infected, none died. A later analysis of the virus found it was not nearly as virulent as the 1918 strain.
https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/swine-flu-1976-sheffield-mans-death-set-off-panic,228268