Bath, U.K.―In the winter of 1999 in war-torn Kosovo, scores of people started coming down with headaches and sore throats that hung on much longer than a normal flu. In many cases, the patients' lymph nodes swelled to gigantic proportions and sometimes broke through the skin to form hideous open sores. It took half a year for scientists from the World Health Organization to make a surprising diagnosis: tularemia, a rare bacterial infection most often seen in North American rabbit hunters, villagers in central Sweden, and farmers in southern Russia. Tularemia succumbs readily to antibiotics, and by May the outbreak had subsided after 327 cases, none of which were fatal.
展开▼
