January 5, 2018 Hello ,
Take a mysterious, deadly disease.
Add three long decades of investigation. Total the brave men who risked everything for medical science.
And you've got today's story.
I hope 2018 is off to a good start for you. I got so involved in this story yesterday that it grew longer and longer. This is part one, watch for part two next week.
Fatal Fever Sleuths, Part 1 First came the high fever, vomiting and muscle aches, then after a few days a blue-black rash started to spread from the wrists and ankles to cover the entire body and victims of the inscrutable sickness became delirious and often died.
It showed up in Montana's Bitterroot Valley in the late 1800s and nobody knew where it came from or how to cure it. Due to its dramatic symptoms people called it the black measles.
Today the illness is called Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and it remains a killer.
Photo courtesy www.explorethebitterroot.com
As people settled the Bitterroot cases of black measles increased. At the turn of the century, two out
of every three people contracting the fever died. Most victims had been healthy and in the prime of life. The call went out for scientists to come and crack this killer disease. Five scientists who answered that summons would die before a vaccine was
discovered for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF).
Obituary, Northwest Tribune, 1901: Charles Draper, 25 years, of Kendall's lumber camp on the westside died at the Sisters Hospital on April 4 of that dread disease spotted fever, after a few days' illness.
Compiled from news reports 2017
Kenley René Ratliff, 2, passed away on Sunday, June 4, 2017 at the Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. Lab tests showed the child tested positive for Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a tick-borne bacterial infection. Kenley had gone camping before getting sick. Within five days the infection took over her body and doctors could not save
her.
Below, Kenley fights for life before succumbing to RMSF. Fatal cases of have been on the rise for the last couple decades in the U.S. Antibiotics are a sure cure and have dramatically reduced the risk of death from RMSF over the last 85-years. But the trouble is, early symptoms can be mistaken for a number of less serious illness. Kenley was diagnosed with strep
and by the time the spots showed up, it was too late.
The name Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is deceptive as it people have caught it in every state except Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont, as well as Canada and Central and South America. But the origin of the worst cases was the Bitterroot Valley in Montana where cases erupted every year from about mid-March to mid-June. The first scientific study of the disease started there in 1902. Initially, doctors and citizens conjectured the rash and fever might be caused by melting snow water, unhygienic conditions or miasmas arising from decaying spring vegetation in
swampy areas on the west side of the valley.
Two scientists arrived and investigated spotted fever in the spring months of 1902, 1903, and 1904, but made little progress beyond the theory that the fever was carried by ticks. Then funding ran out.
An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association deplored the fact that the
cause
"of this strange disease is as obscure as ever...The tick theory of the disease seems to have reduced the inhabitants almost to a state of panic, and it is hoped that the disease will be re-investigated ... if only to reassure them and to render the development of this fertile valley practicable."
A couple years later, a young pathologist
from the University of Chicago, Dr. Howard Ricketts began to visit the valley each summer to continue the quest for the cause, treatment and prevention of the disease. Dr. Ricketts confirmed RMSF was transmitted by the wood tick, and by 1909, he had isolated the bacterial organism responsible for the disease. That organism was later named for
him, Rickettsia rickettsii.
In 1910, the state faced a budget crunch and fearing his research funding would be cut, Ricketts took a job in Mexico City to study a typhus outbreak. Soon after arriving, Ricketts contracted typhus and died.
Other deaths would follow as scientists continued trying to
puzzle out RMSF. In 1912, while continuing Rickett's studies in Montana, Thomas B. McClintic of the U.S. Public Health and Marine Hospital Service became infected with spotted fever and died.
Scientists were also trying to unravel the mystery at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, and in March 1918, a young lab aide, 23-year-old Stephen Mohnscek, fell ill with the
fever and died.
In 1917, Arthur H. McCray became the State of Montana's first full-time state bacteriologist. He took up RMSF research hoping "to derive a curative serum for the treatment of the disease." In early June 1919, while working in the laboratory, he was infected. McCray died on 14 June
1919.
By the early 1920s, folks in the valley had spent ten years trying to exterminate ticks by burning brush and offering a bounty on gophers thought to host ticks, yet people continued to die of the
disease.
The sickness was cyclical, some years not many cases showed up. In 1921, only eleven were reported in the Bitterroot Valley, but all eleven people died, a 100-percent mortality rate.
The region's economy also suffered over the decade, as word of the deaths spread. In some parts of the valley, land prices fell from $125 to $15 per
acre.
The state grasped for money to fund further research, and scientists continued trying to understand the mysterious fever.
Ralph L.Parker conducted his experiments for a time in a woodshed shown above. Finally, in 1921, he found an abandoned schoolhouse on the west side of the valley and arranged to have it rented by the U.S. Public Health Service
Parker, an entomologist was joined in the "schoolhouse lab" by bacteriologist Roscoe R. Spencer, and the two worked to create a vaccine. They assembled a team of researchers, some of them
volunteers.
In this time before sanitary gloves and antibiotics, it was a dangerous pursuit. Could they break open the enigma of this fatal fever? How many more scientists would die trying?
Watch for next weeks newsletter to learn about the quest for a vaccine, and why Rocky Mountain
Spotted Fever remains a danger today. Until next week... Have you read a great book? Tell me about it. Have a burning question? Let me know. If you know someone who might enjoy
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