Word: killers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...something that soon came to be known as "Legion Disease," an official in the state's division of communicable diseases asked Hoak if he was aware of an unusual number of illnesses among his colleagues. Hoak's reply confirmed the worst: there was an invisible, impersonal mass killer on the loose. The knowledge rekindled, despite all the advances of modern medicine, humanity's ancient memories of epidemics beyond understanding or control. Even as the first waves of shock and fear began to spread through Pennsylvania and beyond, the search for the killer began...
...rampaging epidemic began to dissipate. The disease seemed to spare completely the large 41st International Eucharistic Congress of Catholics in Philadelphia last week (see RELIGION). But the mystery of what caused the Legion deaths remained to be solved, and until it was, no one could be sure the killer might not just as suddenly revive, reappear and strike in force again...
...effort to track down the Philadelphia killer, some 150 federal and state disease detectives-physicians, biologists, chemists-set to work in Pennsylvania in a massive microbe hunt that resembled a police dragnet. Working round the clock, state officials turned an office in Harrisburg into a sort of "war room." One wall of the makeshift headquarters was covered with a map pierced with colored pins tracing the outbreak of Legionnaires' disease-red pins for deaths, yellow ones for reported illness. At several desks, shirtsleeved workers transferred information onto large sheets of graph paper. At others, workers telephoned the state...
...determine if influenza was the killer, the researchers took solutions made from tissues taken from disease victims and injected them into three kinds of cultures-chick embryos, human and monkey cells, and live mice. The viruses would indicate their presence by killing the living cells and by killing or infecting the mice. They would reveal their existence in the chicks indirectly. Fluid from the infected chick eggs was mixed with samples of normal animal blood to see if the embryonic cells would agglutinate, or "clump" together; if they did, it would mean that a virus was present...
Whatever the solution-or the lack of one-to the mystery of the Philadelphia killer, the outbreak served as a jarring reminder that all the marvels of modern technology have not yet made the U.S. immune to a sudden pestilence. Indeed many medical experts warn that the U.S. is still largely unprepared for an onslaught of swine flu, which some fear could hit the U.S. this winter. The new flu, although probably not as dangerous as the World War I variety, could be at least as virulent as the Asian strains that have swept the country in recent years...