TY - JOUR T1 - History lessons: the Asian Flu pandemic JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 622 LP - 623 DO - 10.3399/bjgp09X453882 VL - 59 IS - 565 AU - Claire Jackson Y1 - 2009/08/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/59/565/622.abstract N2 - ‘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. We can only hope that people will have taken advantage of their opportunities and at the end it may be possible to construct an adequate explanation of what happened.’1 So wrote J Corbett McDonald of the Public Health Laboratory Service, to Ian Watson, Director of the College of General Practitioners' Epidemic Observation Unit in the autumn of 1957. He was referring to that year's Asian flu pandemic. In the event, neither the Unit nor the PHLS undertook any large scale research projects during the outbreak and later studies were limited. The Unit's retrospective investigation had a response from 42 practices, of which only 29 provided useable data. Could or should more have been done? By 1957, unlike 1918, there was a global network of laboratories linked to the World Influenza Research Centre in London, which aimed to create a clearing house for research and tracking the virus.In 1957 it had all seemed initially quiet on the UK influenza front. Dr McDonald's quarterly report (November 1956—March 1957) mentioned a ‘remarkably low level of respiratory illness so far this winter.’ However, a Times newspaper comment (17 April) that ‘an influenza epidemic has affected thousands of Hong Kong residents’ heralded the start of rapid movement across the East with 100 000 cases in Taiwan by mid-May and over a million in India by June. Five months after the Hong Kong outbreak it was reckoned to have traversed the globe. As an entirely new strain there was no immunity in the populace and the first vaccines were not distributed until August in the … ER -