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This hypothesis, however, also failed to test out. CDC researchers screened the tissues for evidence of antibodies to bird-carried viruses. The results were negative. CDC tests found no indication of either plague or typhoid fever. So the search went on into more exotic terrain. Tests also ruled out tularemia (rabbit fever), a deadly tropical disease known as Lassa fever, and Marburg disease, a viral disease from Africa. Further screening seemed to dismiss fungi as a suspect; no fungus is known to produce the fatally fulminating pneumonia typical of Legion disease...
Each possibility dismissed narrowed the track. By week's end Dr. Leonard Bachman, Pennsylvania's secretary of health, suspected that some unidentified natural toxin could have been responsible for the outbreak, and the CDC tended to agree. Using this suspicion as a hypothesis, epidemiologists are now taking another look at the restaurants in which the Legionnaires ate and the hotels in which they stayed, and are studying environmental conditions to determine if they might have played a role in the disease. They are investigating the possibility that the conventiongoers were exposed to some kind of poisonous substance during...
Whatever killed the Legionnaires, the disease detectives concede, may, in the end, prove impossible to detect. "There's an outside chance we may never find out the cause," said CDC Director David Sencer. "I think we will. But there are times when disease baffles us all. It may be a sporadic, a onetime appearance...
...Center for Disease Control, a complex of red brick buildings sprawling on the outskirts of Atlanta, represents for the health of the U.S. what the grim, gray Pentagon does for national defense. The CDC's purpose is to identify, seek out and destroy both present and potential enemies of U.S. public health. Its activities take varied forms, some statistical and educational, but the most celebrated group on its roster is the disease detectives like those who have been struggling with the mystery of the American Legionnaires'Philadelphia fever...
...David Eraser, 32, chief of CDC'S special bacterial pathogens branch, flew to Philadelphia as soon as the CDC received Pennsylvania's call for help. He supervised the collection, by a staff of 18 investigators, of the materials that his laboratory colleagues at headquarters would need: throat swabbings, garglings, blood samples, urine and fecal specimens and-from victims already dead -snippets of lung and other tissue. Batch after batch of these were collected and flown to Atlanta, where they were hand-carried to the CDC...