It was February 1976 when soldier David Lewis fell ill at Fort Dix, New Jersey. He complained of feeling weak and feverish; within days he was dead. An autopsy attributed his death to H1N1, or human swine flu.
Thirty-five years later and 13,000 kilometres around the world, Lewis' death and the chain of events it set in motion are still having repercussions in Hong Kong, according to Medical Association vice-president Dr Alvin Chan Yee-shing.
They are at the root of fears about the safety of flu vaccines he feels are behind the shunning of the seasonal vaccine in the past two years by a large proportion of Hongkongers.
'Last year only 10 per cent of the population got the vaccination because of phobias,' Chan, chairman of the association's vaccination task force, says. 'That is why an epidemic still occurred and a few middle-aged people with no history of chronic illnesses contracted influenza and died.'
Following the soldier's death and fearing a repeat of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people, then US president Gerald Ford ordered a mass immunisation campaign with a hastily produced vaccine.
However, within weeks of the campaign getting under way in October 1976, people began falling sick with Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), a rare illness in which the body's immune system attacks the nerves, causing numbness, paralysis and sometimes death. As more people fell ill, fears grew of a link between the vaccine and the illness, and the immunisation programme was halted.