Armstrong – Table of Contents

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A young Public Health Service physician, Dr. Richard G. Henderson, assigned to
the scrub typhus project, acquired a fatal laboratory infection with the organism. He died
October 20, 1944. His laboratory assistant, Leroy Snellbaker, also became ill but he
recovered (Snellbaker later became the author’s laboratory technician). A few days prior
to these events (28) Topping encountered Henderson and Snellbaker in the laboratory and
was aghast when he found them grinding scrub typhus infected yolk sacs in a Waring
blender on an open desktop without taking protective precautions. Topping was doubly
perturbed since he and Charles Shepard had designed and built a functioning isolation
cabinet (to be described later in the chapter) for use with highly infectious, virulent
organisms.
In November 1944, Dr. Armstrong recruited Dr. Robert J. Huebner (29) from the
USPHS Out Patient Ear, Nose and Throat Clinic into the Division of Infectious Diseases
and assigned him to the Rickettsial Unit. The unit discontinued work with scrub typhus
when World War II ended and then resumed investigating Q fever. A second large
laboratory outbreak occurred soon thereafter (30), carefully documented by Huebner, the
new unit member. Topping left rickettsial research after investigating an outbreak of Q
fever in Amarillo, Texas with Shepard in 1946 (31). The Rickettsial Unit continued until
about the middle of 1949 under the brilliant direction of Huebner who solved the riddle
of the new mystery disease, Rickettsialpox, (also known as Kew Gardens spotted fever)
and who discovered how Q fever spread from its natural host, the dairy cow, to the
unfortunate population of Los Angeles County, California (29). The recent biography of
Huebner (29) describes these accomplishments in detail including Armstrong’s help with
the investigation of rickettsialpox (29).

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