Solar radiation basis of new flu theory

Press, 30 August 1984, Page 25

Solar radiation basis of new flu theory

NZPA-AP London A new study suggests flu epidemics are caused by global movements in solar radiation — not by the random arrival of alien viruses.

The study by Dr Robert Hope-Simpson of Britain’s Epidemiological Research Unit, published in the latest journal of “Hygiene,” researched all serious flu outbreaks around the world between 1964 and 1975.

Dr Hope-Simpson said that present medical opinion that the flu virus survived by endless, and sometimes international, chains of direct transmission from individual sufferers failed to explain why epidemics would be seasonal.

He identified a chronological pattern with outbreaks occurring around the Earth’s surface in a curve approximately six months behind the “midsummer” curve of vertical solar radiation. The data showed that two widely separated localities

on the same line of latitude — Prague and Cirencester, England — had a series of simultaneous outbreaks caused by the same virus between 1969 and 1974.

A comparison between England and New South Wales in Australia, two regions on latitudes nearly equidistant from the Equator, further revealed the same virus sparked off epidemics in both regions some six months apart. Dr Hope-Simpson said that such phenomena occured because the seasonal variation in solar radiation along each line of latitude activated the latent flu virus existing in those areas.

The latent virus was carried in the tissue of people who suffered and recovered from flu in the previous epidemic, he said. Though such carriers were immune from a recurrence of the illness, when the virus was reactivated they become for a short period intensely infectious to their non-immune companions, he said.