Word: cdc
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When New York City hospitals began suspecting Legionnaires' disease as the cause of the unusual type of pneumonia from which six garment-district patients were suffering, they sent blood samples first to the CDC laboratory in Manhattan for analysis and then to Atlanta. The CDC confirmed the diagnosis. By then two victims had died, both deliverymen, who trundle racks loaded with dresses through traffic-choked streets. Investigators looking for clues to the source of the outbreak instantly checked to see if the two worked for the same shop; they did not, but were employed on the same block...
...city's government acted swiftly. Mayor Edward Koch appointed his deputy director of operations, Paul Caswell, to head a task force coordinating the efforts of city agencies combatting the disease. Working in what resembled a war room, Caswell ordered air-conditioning systems in the area shut off; the CDC's investigators had traced the earlier Indiana outbreak to an air conditioner with a bacteria-contaminated water supply. City inspectors swarmed through the district, taking water samples from air-conditioning systems, and draining and sterilizing rooftop tanks where the water was stored. Below, sanitationmen hosed down the streets...
...some cases of Legionnaires' disease were added to the list while other suspected cases were struck off, the number of possible victims bobbled up and down around the 100 mark, with only eight positively confirmed. Last week Koch's commandos and the CDC detectives agreed that the outbreak had apparently passed its peak. The workers, glad to have the area scrubbed down and cleansed as never before, were jubilant as air conditioning was turned on again-an event that generated a block-long sigh of relief in Macy's huge department store, which borders the district...
Because the incident follows a similar one at a London hospital in 1973 that claimed two lives, it confirmed WHO'S belief that virus labs have become the last major source of smallpox danger. Already WHO has recommended that only five centers in the entire world, including the CDC in Atlanta, be allowed to store strains of the virus for research purposes. Birmingham was not one of these, and Bedson had planned to destroy his lethal collection...
...CDC Epidemiologist David Fraser was unable to say how the microbe got into the water; one theory: it was carried there by particles of dust, possibly from nearby construction activity. But he did note encouragingly that when antirust materials or algicides are added to the contaminated water, the organism perishes...