On July 6, 1968, the National Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta announced that it "did not expect any widespread outbreaks of influenza" in the 1968-69 flu season. But the NCDC -- the predecessor of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- soon had to correct itself.
By late September, the so-called Hong Kong flu had stricken Marines returning from Vietnam. By mid-December, the flu was knocking thousands of Americans off their feet. The 1968 pandemic claimed the lives of actress Tallulah Bankhead and master spy Allen Dulles, and President Lyndon Johnson spent one of his last, lonely White House weeks in bed with the flu.
The cause of the pandemic was a major shift in the type of hemagglutinin protein on the surface of the virus. Flu viruses that have undergone this shift often spread quickly, but they aren't necessarily any more deadly than seasonal strains. So it was with the 1968 virus. Only a careful reader of the New York Times would have noticed the flu pandemic. Stories about it tended to land on Page 65 and go on for all of three paragraphs. The flu season of 1951 -- not a pandemic year -- was, in fact, more lethal in many parts of the world.
Contrast that with the blare of publicity, alarm and school closings that followed the CDC's announcement in late April that a potential pandemic was in the offing. The world's swift reaction to the new swine flu virus displayed the superb power of our technology when it comes to detecting and reporting on things that are very small or very far away. That's mainly what the biotech and information revolutions have done: increase our powers of detection. But detection is only the first step to understanding, and detected facts can be deceptive if they are incomplete.
For example, we're very good at finding tumor antigen levels in elderly men's blood but not so good at figuring out whether this sign of a prostate cancer is a cause for alarm or action. We now can find out whether genes predispose us to breast cancer or stroke, but evaluating the risk and deciding what to do about it are far from obvious. Do we remove a young woman's breasts if she carries a certain gene for breast cancer? Do we choose invasive, but preventive, brain surgery to place an arterial clamp?
