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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...
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...
Doctors worried at first that the hospital itself might be the source of the infection. But this fear was allayed when a CDC team from Atlanta found-from the advanced state of their disease-that at least four patients had been infected before they came to the hospital. Then where did the disease originate? No one knows yet. But as they continued looking for telltale signs of Legionnaires' disease -characteristic antibodies-in the blood of other Vermonters who recently had "pneumonia," investigators expected to find still more cases. Said Dr. Charles Phillips, head of the hospital's infectious...
...right. The CDC has now confirmed that 24 people have died of Legionnaires' disease in 19 states since the Philadelphia epidemic. It also suspects there may be as many as 2,000 undetected cases a year. Though scientists believe that the culprit is a slow-growing, rod-shaped (as yet unnamed) bacterium, they do not know where it lives in nature, how it spreads or why it is so lethal. Only one thing seems sure. The bug was almost certainly around, even if misdiagnosed, long before the Legionnaires gathered for their ill-fated convention in Philadelphia...