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1957 flu pandemic, outbreak of influenza that was first identified in February 1957 in East Asia and that subsequently spread to countries worldwide. The outbreak caused an estimated 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 deaths worldwide and is considered to have been the least severe of the three 20th-century influenza pandemics.
- Kara Rogers
- Where did the 1957 flu pandemic originate?The 1957 outbreak of influenza was first detected in Singapore in February that year. In the months that followed, the outbreak spread to Hong Kong...
- How many deaths were caused by the 1957 flu pandemic?The 1957 flu pandemic caused an estimated one million to two million deaths worldwide and is generally considered to have been the least severe of...
- How did the 1957 flu pandemic impact flu vaccine development?The 1957 flu pandemic was caused by influenza H2N2 virus, to which few people had previous exposure. A vaccine was rapidly developed against H2N2,...
- Why did the 1957 flu cause some people to become more ill than others?The 1957 flu outbreak was associated with variation in susceptibility and course of influenza illness. Some infected individuals experienced only m...
The 1957–1958 Asian flu pandemic was a global pandemic of influenza A virus subtype H2N2 that originated in Guizhou in Southern China. The number of excess deaths caused by the pandemic is estimated to be 1–4 million around the world (1957–1958 and probably beyond), making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
Jan 2, 2019 · In February 1957, a new influenza A (H2N2) virus emerged in East Asia, triggering a pandemic (“Asian Flu”). This H2N2 virus was comprised of three different genes from an H2N2 virus that originated from an avian influenza A virus, including the H2 hemagglutinin and the N2 neuraminidase genes.
Aug 1, 2009 · History lessons: the Asian Flu pandemic. ‘Although we have had 30 years to prepare for what should be done in the event of an influenza pandemic, I think we have all been rushing around trying to improvise investigations with insufficient time to do it properly.
- Claire Jackson
- 2009
- Overview
- The 1957 Virus Shifted
- When Flu Hit the U.S., a Vaccine Was Ready
By the time the virus reached the U.S., the country already had a vaccine ready.
On April 17, 1957, Maurice Hilleman realized a pandemic was on its way to the United States. That day, The New York Times reported on a large influenza outbreak in Hong Kong. One detail, in particular, caught the doctor’s eye: in the long waiting lines for clinics, the paper said “women carried glassy-eyed children tied to their backs.” He quickly got to work, putting out the word that there was a pandemic coming and pushing to develop a vaccine by the time school started again in the fall.
The first case of the pandemic had appeared in the Guizhou Province of southwestern China in February 1957. By the time Hilleman read about it in April, the Times reported that an estimated 250,000 Hong Kong residents—or 10 percent of the region’s population—were receiving treatment for it.
History Shorts: The Doctor Who Stopped An American Epidemic (Forged in Crisis)
“We all missed it,” he later recalled for The Vaccine Makers Project. “The military missed it, and the World Health Organization missed it.”
The day after reading the story, he sent a cable to an Army Medical General Laboratory in Zama, Japan, asking the staff to investigate what was going on in Hong Kong. A medical officer identified a member of the U.S. Navy who’d become infected in Hong Kong and sent the serviceman’s saliva back to Hilleman in the United States so he could study the virus.
Dr. Maurice Hilleman, pictured center, talking with his research team as they study the flu virus in a lab at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, 1957.
As the chief of respiratory diseases at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., Hilleman “had access to large numbers of serum obtained from people at various ages through previous years and decades,” says pediatrician Paul A. Offit, who serves as director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and is the author of Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases.
In his work at Walter Reed, Hilleman had made the critical observation that the two key proteins in the flu virus—hemagglutinin and neuraminidase—undergo slight changes, or “drift,” between seasons (this insight helped him predict the need for yearly flu vaccinations).
By comparing the Navy serviceman’s virus against previous flu viruses, “what he found was that there was this dramatic shift,” Offit says. “Both those proteins were completely different from what they had been previously. They hadn’t just drifted, they’d shifted.” This new virus was a completely different strain of the flu.
Hilleman couldn’t find any evidence of population immunity to this new strain, so he sent the virus to other health organizations to confirm his findings. These organizations found that the only people who had antibodies to the virus were a small group in their 70s and 80s who had survived the “Russian flu” pandemic in 1889 and 1890.
With this knowledge, Hilleman put out press releases announcing a new flu pandemic had arrived and would reach the United States by September 1957. Though he met some resistance, he successfully convinced companies to begin working on flu vaccines to have ready by then. Fertilized chicken eggs would be necessary for this production, so he told the companies to remind farmers not to kill their roosters at the end of the hatching season.
Researchers study the flu virus in a lab at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 1957.
When the new flu strain hit the United States in September, just as Hilleman had predicted it would, the country was ready with a vaccine. The virus, dubbed the “Asian flu,” killed an estimated 70,000 to 116,000 Americans and one to four million people worldwide, but experts suggest it would have killed many more if not for the vaccine. Around the time Hilleman was born, the “Spanish flu” of 1918 to 1919 killed an estimated 675,000 Americans and 50 million people worldwide.
“That’s the tricky thing about public health,” says Alexandra Lord, chair of the division of medicine and science at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
“When things go really, really well, it’s very hard to say, ‘this many lives were saved,’ because we don’t know what would’ve happened without it,” she says. “And so while it’s impossible for us to say how many lives exactly were saved, I think it’s just good to say that he dramatically turned a pandemic around.”
- Becky Little
- 1 min
May 25, 2020 · Mark Honigsbaum. Published: May 25, 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736 (20)31201-0. Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics. The virus emerged in China in the winter of 1957 and spread rapidly worldwide via ships, aeroplanes, and trains.
In April 1957, a new strain of a lethal respiratory virus emerged in East Asia, caught local health authorities by surprise and eventually killed masses of people worldwide....
