Swine Flu: A Lesson Learned?

Our current Swine Flu outbreak isn’t the first time we’ve faced a similar virus. The way health experts are reacting this time however; is very different.

In 1976, David Lewis, a soldier at Fort Dix, New Jersey, collapsed and died during a five mile march. Lewis had been suffering from flu like symptoms but left the hospital, against the doctor’s advice, to join his company on the night time march. The CDC discovered that Lewis had died from the Swine Flu virus. Further investigation turned up nine more cases of Swine Flu at Fort Dix.

Dr. David Sencer, Director for the Center for Disease Control at the time, recommended to then President Gerald Ford, that the government begin vaccinating every US citizen immediately. Fearing a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic which killed more than 500,000 Americans, Congress agreed, passing a bill into law to produce and inoculate up to ninety-five percent of the US population. Forty million Americans received the vaccinations, nearly two out of every three Minnesotans lined up for the shots.

Unfortunately, the cure turned out to be more deadly than the disease.
Only one person died from the Swine Flu but 25 people died from a disease they contracted from the vaccination.

In a report from the Suburban Emergency Management Project (SEMP), an organization that provides support to organizations that manage disaster services, it was a Minnesota doctor who discovered the connection between the flu vaccinations and Guillain-Barre syndrome. One of the Minnesota doctor’s patients had become paralyzed after receiving the injection. The doctor reported his findings to Minnesota’s immunization program officer, Dr. Denton Peterson. Dr. Peterson forwarded the information to the CDC. According to SEMP, the CDC was indifferent to Dr. Peterson’s findings. Dr. Peterson refused to give up and discovered reports of similar cases across the country.

Dr. Peterson found three more cases, one of them fatal, within a week of reporting the original suspicions to the CDC. Dr. Peterson passed this new information on to the CDC, which had just learned about four more cases in New Jersey and Alabama. Millions of Americans had already been inoculated by then. Over five hundred Americans would develop Guillain-Barre symptoms as a direct result according to SEMP.

The 1976 Swine Flu outbreak claimed only one life worldwide but twenty-five Guillain-Barre patients died.

World health officials will be slower to suggest mass inoculations this time around.