Aches & Pains

Heavily muffled passengers in Santiago's trim blue-green tramcars kept their distance last week, averted their faces when a fellow rider coughed. Movies played to half-empty houses night after night. As the year's first snowfall melted on Santiago's streets, Chileans shivered in one of the worst grippe epidemics in their country's history.

Some 40,000 santiaguinos suffered from the disease, including President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla and Interior Minister Admiral Immanuel Holger. Characterized by high fever and acute stomach pains, this year's influenza-like grippe was far more serious than the native garrotazo (literally, "clubbing"), which has afflicted Chileans for decades. Said Dr. Mario Plaza de los Reyes, a leading Santiago physician: "I've examined 30 cases and found in all of them symptoms similar to European grippe."

The National Health Service ransacked its files for possible methods of treatment, set up emergency vaccination stations. In 1933's epidemic of ordinary garrotazo, with only 15,530 cases registered, more than 3,000 died. The epidemic of 1949 had just begun.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.