Word: breuer
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...confirmed O157 infection. Because E. coli can be passed by touch from one person to another before it's unknowingly ingested, it was possible that he had picked up the bug from one of his friends in Alpine. But the water-bacteria link was too promising to ignore. Breuer also contacted LaFonda Scott, the woman who had organized the family reunion in Alpine. Scott reported that she and several of her relatives had tested positive for O157. Over the next few days, Breuer interviewed 41 of the 43 Scotts who had visited Alpine and came up with some sobering numbers...
...morning, a three-member EIS team arrived in Alpine and set up shop in the town's city hall, an unlovely, one-room structure used for basketball games, karate classes, the occasional play and, when absolutely necessary, running the local government. The leader of the federal team was Thomas Breuer, a 37-year-old German physician in his second year as an EIS researcher. Working with him were Sonja Olsen and Malinda Kennedy...
...Breuer, a veteran of four previous infectious-disease outbreaks, appreciated the enormousness of the job ahead of him. Miller's nurses had turned up no food or other contaminant all the victims had shared. This left only two possibilities: "Water and air," Breuer says, "two things epidemiologists hate." A contamination of this kind was a hit-and-run affair; the bacterial colonies could stream into a community, do their damage and flow out of the ecosystem in a matter of days, before the epidemiologists could even get their equipment unpacked...
...Once Breuer, Olsen and Kennedy got themselves set up, they found a community in a state of high alert. Mayor Wooden had already switched the Alpine water supply from the natural springs to a chlorinated well system and instructed townspeople to boil water before drinking it. Residents brought the CDC researchers ice that might be needed to keep stool samples cool during the eight-hour drive from Alpine to the state laboratory in Cheyenne. The phone company provided extra telephone lines for the duration of the crisis...
...Breuer, Olsen and Kennedy quickly made use of those lines, spending the next several days phoning people who had already got sick, who might be getting sick or who had remained uninfected, looking for anything they did--or didn't--have in common. The calls turned up some promising leads. One woman worked in an Alpine day-care center and routinely drank eight glasses of tap water a day and even gave some to her infant daughter. Yet both of them were healthy. That seemed to exonerate the water supply, until the woman added one final detail. When...