- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday January 19 2000 02.23 GMT
It made the festive season a misery for many and threw NHS policy into crisis. But the flu may have worse in store, according to scientists who claim to have discovered an alarming explanation for the epidemic - a virus from outer space.
Dismissing as dogma the conventional medical wisdom that flu is a virus passed by human contact, the distinguished astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle, and his colleague at Cardiff university, Chandra Wickramasinghe, warn that we may be on the brink of a global epidemic.
In a report to be published in the journal Current Science, they claim the outbreak was caused by dust deposited high in the atmosphere by passing comets being forced down to earth by energy generated by cooler patches on the sun's surface, known as sunspots.
They reach the peak of their activity, the maxima, every 11 years, coinciding, the scientists say, with all major flu outbreaks since 1761, including the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic blamed for 20m deaths worldwide. The latest cycle began to peak in September and the maxima is due sometime this year.
