Medicine: Costly Contamination

By comparison with the great influenza epidemics, the plague that hit Minnesota recently was a trivial affair. One hundred and twenty-five people were stricken with nausea and diarrhea after eating in a local restaurant. No one died in the outbreak, but about 50 were sufficiently sick to consult physicians, eleven were afflicted seriously enough to require hospitalization, and many were bedridden for one or more days. Normally, such an outbreak, which was traced to Salmonella bacteria, receives little attention from health authorities.

But researchers from the Center for Dis ease Control in Atlanta and the Minnesota Department of Health studied this...

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