Sickness on the Slopes

The little Alpine ski resort of Zermatt rakes in a lucrative $10 million from visitors each year, but the authorities there know that customers are notoriously fickle; overnight a touch of bad weather, bad service in the hotels or an ugly scandal can send hundreds of tourists off in a huff to St. Moritz or Davos. Hence the reluctance of Zermatt's townsmen to talk about the curious wave of illness that began popping up three months ago. They stolidly ignored word from a Zurich physician that a patient just back from skiing in Zermatt was down with typhoid fever. They also shrugged off a report that an Italian immigrant working near Zermatt had fallen ill with the same disease.

Even then, Zermatt officials publicly pooh-poohed rumors of an epidemic. The Zermatt Tourist Office pronounced Zermatt's water "99.93% pure," while local citizens denounced the "foreign sensationalist press" for reporting the gossip.

As thousands more unwary tourists poured in, packing Zermatt's 56 hotels to the rafters, cash registers jingled--and typhoid spread unchecked.

Last week Zermatt was regretting its laxity. Already dead were three Zermatt citizens and a British tourist. At least 350 confirmed or suspected cases of typhoid had been traced to recent Zermatt visitors in Switzerland and eight foreign countries. Little Zermatt was suddenly in the headlines all over the world. Virtually all the 10,000 tourists had staged a hurried exodus, leaving Zermatt a ghost town occupied by 120 green-uniformed Swiss army medical corpsmen. By sealed train and helicopter, the army men evacuated local victims, and health inspectors poking through Zermatt's water system discovered the probable cause of it all--a hole in a water pipe into which sewage was seeping.

At week's end, denounced at home by the Valais Medical Association for a conspiracy of silence, and disgraced abroad, the Zermatt authorities at last closed down all the hotels and restaurants. To the villagers left stranded in dismal unemployment, it seemed a pity, for nearly a foot of new powder snow fell on the slopes that night. "Absolutely wonderful skiing conditions," mourned Gottlieb Perren, head of Zermatt's famed ski school.

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