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128  Our Defense Spending Ought
     To Include Flu Protection
     The Washington Post  December 14, 1968

     Millions of Americans will pay the price this winter for our 
shameful neglect of a vital aspect of our national security. Only a 
handful will give up their lives; most of us will remember the "Hong 
Kong flu" merely as an unpleasant interruption in our daily life and 
work.

     My own muscles still ache and my head throbs, but the worst of it
perhaps is to nurse a young child through the alarming high fever that
this relatively "harmless" virus carries in its wake.

     What makes this epidemic such an abomination is that, although we
have known for months that it was coming, we are so poorly organized
in this area of national security that our early warning has been to
no practical avail. A few older citizens may still benefit from a 
vaccine that is now approaching final test and limited protection, but
this will be too late and too imperfectly effective to have any real
influence on the course of the epidemic.

     The attack rate of this virus in Hong Kong was at least 20 per
cent. If the same holds in the United States, and there is no reason
to expect it not to spread equally viciously, the epidemic will cost
us several billion dollars in time out from work, in disruption of
schools and travel plans and in medical and nursing care - not to 
mention personal discomfort and anxiety and a backwash of a few thousand
cases of more serious disease.

     The most serious complications of influenza are bacterial 
infections, and we are lucky to have antibiotics to treat most of these
when they are properly diagnosed and classified. But we have no
real guarantee that the Hong Kong flu virus, itself a product of some
obscure mutation, will not change again during the course of its 
global rampage and turn into something considerably nastier. Neither can
the possibility be discounted of an insidious cooperation between the
flu and some other viruses equally inaccessible to antibiotics.

     Clearly, we have not begun to use our potential scientific 
resources in investigating and reacting to these threats.  We are so
wound up in establishing our military defense that we give second
priority to developing the defensive systems against equally tangible
but more impersonal threats like a Chinese virus.

     The key to an effective system of virus defense is an upgrading
of our technology for the quantity production of new viruses in 
chemically pure form. The essential scientific groundwork for this 
technology has been laid.

     We know now that viruses as particles of nucleic acid plus 
protein, and we know these particles have a precisely definable 
molecular structure.  We have the apparatus, particularly with the zonal
centrifuge developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, for the 
highly refined chemical purification and assay of virus particles.
Finally, we know that viruses can be grown in indefinitely large
amounts on tissue cells in culture, giving a precision and 
reproducibility that can scarcely be expected from tissues freshly 
harvested from wild monkeys or dogs off the street or even the fertile 
hen's eggs now in wide use.

     On these foundations, it would be entirely feasible to implement a
routine alert to produce and test seed stocks of vaccine viruses for 
every new disease within weeks--at most--of the emergence of new
cases. It will be an order of magnitude more expensive than our 
present investment in anti-virus defense. Is there any other field where
our stinginess is more self-destructive?  The next influenza may not
be so benign.

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