the Cooks
p. 33 · Read in the full issue
Serious 'flu hit's the Cooks
Rarotonga was in the grips of a serious influenza outbreak in mid-August. Seven people, two of them babies, had died and about 70 per cent, of the popu lation sick, when a RNZAF aircraft made an emergency parachute drop of 250 lbs of penicillin and other antibiotics on August 14.
Because the Cook Islands are so rarely in contact with ’flu the population had built up little resistance to it, according to one of the island doctors. The present epidemic had probably been brought from New Zealand by the liner Northern Star three weeks earlier.