Medicine: Recruits' Meningitis

Even as the 25,000 soldiers in the mammoth maze of barracks at California's Fort Ord were being trained for action against an enemy that might be as distant as Viet Nam, they were already engaged in mortal combat with an insidious and invisible invader right in their midst. Spinal meningitis has struck down 59 trainees this year and killed nine of them.

In an all-out effort to halt the epidemic, 3,000 of the soldiers are under drastic quarantine. These are the men who have been on Fort Ord's 29,000 acres of hills and wind-blown...

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