Typhoid Mystery

In most of the U.S. most of the time, typhoid is a "dead" disease. Nobody is in much danger of catching it, and doctors rarely look for it. But occasionally the typhoid bacillus (Salmonella typhosa), as if to keep its charter in the society of menaces, strikes back. This year a baffling outbreak has spread across three Midwestern states. It hit Minnesota most severely in January, Iowa in April. Wisconsin has had a gradual dose of it since the first of the year. To date there have been 121 cases (one death, in Iowa). The victims were from both urban and rural areas, ranged in age from six months to 74. A puzzling feature: no family has had more than one case.

Last week federal and state disease detectives met in Madison, Wis. to pool their clues. But the clues did not add up to an explanation for the outbreak. Public water supplies and fluid milk had been checked and exonerated. The typhoid could not be blamed on a single cause, such as a single batch of perishable food, because such a source would produce a rash of cases in a small area at about the same time.

Said Dr. Harald Graning, Midwest coordinator for the U.S. Public Health Service and chairman of the meeting: "The guilty food product has to be something that was contaminated at one time, then stored with the typhoid germs still living in it, and then distributed. People are still eating this product, which is probably coming out of a warehouse in limited quantities. If the cases start dropping off, we may never solve the mystery."

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