Two Killers

All over the United Kingdom last week, Britons were hacking, aching and dying in an outbreak of influenza. This year's flu bug was not the killer of 1918. It was taking its toll mostly from the aged. Nonetheless, it was keeping Britain's gravediggers, many of whom had flu themselves, busy enough. In six weeks flu deaths in England and Wales rose from 28 to 1,599.

"It's taking up to ten days for the dying to get themselves buried," complained one Liverpool undertaker. Said a cemetery foreman: "We've got carbide flares rigged up so my men can see to work at night." Druggists were running short of medicine bottles. A tenth of Plymouth's overworked doctors were down with flu themselves.

No one knew exactly how many Britons had the flu, but a likely hint lay in the rise of sickness benefits claims from 128,842 to 246,223 in one week.

Meanwhile, in Brighton, officials were battling a comparatively tiny but potentially far deadlier invader--epidemic smallpox. Compared to the sprawling, shapeless influenza blight, it was easy to pin down. The lethal virus had been brought to Britain by an R.A.F. officer who had flown in from Karachi to visit his girl friend, a Brighton telephone operator. It passed from the flyer to the girl to her father. The father died. Before the girl's case could be properly diagnosed, three nurses at the Bevendean Infectious Disease Hospital had caught it. The flyer's clothes had been sent to a laundry, where they infected three more people. By this week the contagion had spread to 35 people ; nine had died.

Housing authorities turned over two houses for 15 quarantined families. Milk bottles delivered at the doors of contact houses were collected and destroyed. Ration books handled by a local grocer who caught the disease were called in and burned. Portions of his stock that could not be disinfected were destroyed. Some 80,000 residents of Brighton and environs flocked, with urging, to be vaccinated.

Having to urge vaccination rather than order it is shocking to many in the U.S., where vaccination is required by law in many states. Vaccination is not compulsory in Britain, even for hospital nurses. A law requiring vaccination of infants stood on the books for 40 years, but it was loosely enforced and seldom observed. Two years ago it was repealed. Why? Said one exasperated medical officer in Brighton last week: "The British are a pigheaded people, and the moment you mention compulsion they start fussing about liberty."

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