A plague on all our houses

摘要

1. A Connecticut man diesof a newly identified tick-borne disease called human granulocytic erlichiosis, or HGE. It is caused by a previously unknown bacterium. 2. A college student contracts a mortal case of Hanta virus infection at his summer home on Shelter Island, New York, off Long Island. The rare virus is carried by rodents and was previously known only in the deserts of the Southwest. 3. And in Zaire, a new outbreak of lethal Ebola virus breaks out, not in a forest village but in a modern city of 600,000, throwing a scare into a whole nation. In 1969, then U.S. Surgeon W. H. Stewart announced it was "time to close the book on infectious diseases." Apparently, disease microorganisms didn't listen. Since then, in addition to the pathogens named above, we've had an expanding AIDS epidemic, Lyme disease, toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaire's disease, and the grimly named flesh-eating bacteria.