# 5207
As the UK struggles with a serious outbreak of influenza, the Guardian.co.uk newspaper has reprinted a 60 year-old tidbit from their archives, harkening back to another – much worse – flu season.
I present this cautionary tale as a reminder that influenza is utterly unpredictable, and deserving of our respect. It is not offered as a prediction of how the current UK outbreak will progress.
A little background, and then a link to the article.
Regular readers of this blog, and those with eclectic historical interests, are probably aware of the short-lived, but devastating `Liverpool’ flu outbreak of 1951. It is an intriguing bit of influenza lore that I’ve written about several times (including here and here).
Briefly: During an otherwise unremarkable and mild influenza season, for about six weeks, a highly virulent influenza erupted in Liverpool, England and then spread across the UK and to Canada – that for a time was as deadly as the 1918 pandemic.
This startling graphic comes from the March 16th, 1951 Proceedings of The Royal Society of Medicine – page 19 – and shows in detail the tremendous spike in influenza deaths in early 1951 over the (admittedly, unusually mild) 1948 flu season.
The CDC's EID Journal has a stellar account of this 1951 event, and is very much worth reading.
Viboud C, Tam T, Fleming D, Miller MA, Simonsen L. 1951 influenza epidemic, England and Wales, Canada, and the United States. Emerg Infect Dis [serial on the Internet]. 2006 Apr [date cited].
This aberrant strain never spread much beyond the UK and eastern Canada, and died out as the flu season came to a close. Thankfully, it did not return the following year.
What made it so virulent remains a medical mystery.
The newspaper article below comes from the early days of that outbreak, before the full impact of the epidemic was apparent. For disease history buffs like myself, a fascinating snapshot in time.
From the archive, 6 January 1951: South Lancashire badly hit by influenza epidemic. Fight to maintain essential services.
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 6 January 1951
Fresh cases of influenza are still being notified in South Lancashire towns as the epidemic, which has seriously affected postal, rail, and municipal transport services and industry, continues. In Warrington there are now more than three thousand cases, and three hundred new medical certificates, mainly for influenza, were handed in yesterday at the local office of the Ministry of National Insurance.
A third of the staff at the town's main railway station are suffering from the illness and auxiliary postmen have been called in to help the Post Office. All visits to hospital maternity homes and old people's homes in the town have been cancelled indefinitely.
Now . . . about getting that yearly flu shot.
