Word: toxins
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...consider the probability that an inadvertently produced harmful organism might cause a laboratory infection, and let us assume the worst case: an E.coli strain producing a potent toxin absorbable from the gut, such a botulinus toxin. Such a strain would indeed present a real danger of laboratory infection. But there are a number of reasons to expect this danger to be less than that with the pathogens that are handled every day by medical bacteriologists...
...thus see that with a strain known to have added the gene for a potent toxin a serious laboratory infection requires the compounding of four low probabilities. With strains from shotgun experiments we have a fifth, very low probability, already mentioned: that an apparently harmless mammalian tissue will yield a dangerous product...
...will conduct bacteriological tests to determine whether the students' symptoms are caused by a viral illness, a bacterial illness, or a bacterial toxin...
...examination of the Legionnaires' hair is particularly helpful, Horowitz explained, because hair retains toxin much longer than the rest of the body...
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...