Armstrong – Table of Contents

manifestations. The Louisiana State Department of Health sent a request for aid to the
Public Health Service in Washington because the wartime possibilities of this epidemic
were ominous. The epidemic zone was in the middle of one of the most crucial military
and shipping areas in the United States, including Army camps, war plants, the Port of
New Orleans and the large population area of New Orleans itself.
In early March 1943, Dr. Byron J. Olson arrived from the Division of Infectious
Diseases. He began working immediately with the Epidemiologist of the Louisiana State
Department of Health, Dr. Waldo L. Treuting. They began to study the patients who were
still living, and they collaborated with the physicians who had been treating the patients.
The disease had a rather distinctive pattern. It started with benign symptoms until shortly
before the patients died when they became suddenly more severely ill leading to rapid
death. Patients who recovered often experienced mental symptoms and personality
changes. The attending physicians observed that only fatal cases could transmit the
disease and the route was most likely by respiratory spread. In view of this mode of
spread, Drs. Olson and Treuting instituted strict isolation and quarantine of patients’
contacts. Some contacts, who left the area prior to the establishment of the quarantine,
were checked quietly by local health authorities in order not to create panic.
Patients who died were transported to the United States Marine Hospital in New Orleans
where Dr. Chapman H. Binford, the hospital pathologist performed autopsies. Dr. Olson
took lung specimens from the autopsied patients as well as sputum, throat washings, and
blood from symptomatic patients injected at the scene into experimental animals, and he
brought these materials back to the NIH laboratory in Building 5 for further study. He
conducted this work together with Dr. Carl L. Larson for the next two years. They sealed