On 2,000 Mark
p. 36 · Read in the full issue
New Guinea's Flu
Death Toll
From JOHN RYAN in Port Moresby Nobody will ever know the real toll of the murderous in fluenza sweeping outback New Guinea.
It is the worst epidemic in New Guinea’s 80 years of recorded his tory, with an officially estimated toll in nine weeks to late October ap proaching 2,000.
There are those in authority who believe it’s much higher.
One thing is certain: once the virus took hold, it cut a swath which left thousands of village groups too sick to work and many people too ill to feed themselves. The overall effect on manpower and the High lands’ economy will take months to assess.
The influenza, against which the more remote villages have little or no natural immunity, quickly became pneumonia. In the cold nights, people died in scores. Some Europeans were also hit, but with doctors or medicaments fairly readily available, they were able to ward it off.
Public Health officers and some nervous Australians had been talking of the possibility of a major ’flu epidemic in the territory long before it arrived. Chemists were continually running short of vaccine in the major towns. The government did consider the idea of mass vaccinations but the cost—an estimated $2 million—ap peared prohibitive.
At the end of September when ’flu death reports began trickling in,, it was too late. Within three weeks,, the government had to call in help' from anywhere it could be found— the Army, RAAF doctors from Aus tralia, volunteers . . . the biggest exercise in New Guinea’s peacetime history .
At month’s end, Parliamentarians: all over New Guinea were trying to decide who, if anybody, was at fault for the disastrous epidemic, and! whether as a matter of principle the sorely-pressed Department of Public Health should go on the pikestaff at the new meeting of the House of Assembly beginning November 10.
Out in the villages, the more primitive tribes were still disposing of their dead and wondering whether the “big sick” had come from the spirits or from the sorcery-making tribes just over the next ridge.