Influenza (Flu) |
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The Hong Kong flu, also known as the 1968 flu pandemic,[1] was a flu pandemic whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed between one and four million people globally.[1][2][3][4][5] It is among the deadliest pandemics in history, and was caused by an H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus, which is descended from H2N2 (caused the Asian flu pandemic in 1957-1958) through antigenic shift—a genetic process in which genes from multiple subtypes are reassorted to form a new virus.[6][7][8]