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Swine Flu History and Origin via Google News Timeline

Before the swine flu media frenzy nears a crescendo maybe we should glace back toward the origin and history of the term “swine flu”.  This whole “epidemic” — quickly morphing into a phenomenon across all media — gives excuse to fire up the  slick new Google News Timeline and explore articles reaching back to nearly the dawn of newspapers.

The earliest mention of this particular type of influenza appears in a January 1929 snippet from the Columbia Missourian.  Read it after the jump:

If this article holds truth, a version of swine flu originated in 1918 with no  transmission from pig to human mentioned.

Fast-forward to the next set of major hits in the Google News Timeline: 1976.  That year President Ford issued a $135 million emergency request to inoculate every American against a potential outbreak of swine flu.  The program was halted because a high number of cases of an illness called Guillain-Barre syndrome were contracted among recently vaccinated people.

This is where I quit digging up past instances of swine flu and reflect on Google’s new news tool.  Its well designed interface is easy to use and offers up a quick glace of a nice pool of information, but it lacks comprehensive authoritative sources.  More newspapers need to scan their archives and offer them up for search in various mediums.