Anatomy Of An Outbreak

Tammy Lowery couldn't see the blood vessels rupturing in her gut, but the way she was feeling, she didn't have to. Lowery had been sick for five days, growing steadily worse as the week wore on. First had come the stomach pains. Then the bloody diarrhea. Then the paralyzing cramps. She had laid off food for a while, figuring the problem would pass. It didn't. Finally, as July 4 approached--when Lowery should have been at the Alpine, Wyo., gift shop where she works, preparing for the crush of campers and tourists who make the Independence Day weekend such a busy one--she noticed that her son Sean, 5, had come down with the same symptoms.

That did it. Struggling to get to the car, Lowery drove Sean to the office of Dr. Donald Kirk, a physician who serves many of Alpine's 470 year-round residents. She got there just in time; shortly after she walked into Kirk's waiting room, Lowery passed out on the floor.

On Friday of the same weekend in late June that Lowery started feeling wobbly, a young motorcyclist who lives in a nearby town was passing through Alpine. Dropping in on some friends, he gulped two glasses of water drawn straight from an Alpine tap. Before too many more days had passed, he realized that he was falling seriously ill.

Just as the motorcyclist was riding out of Alpine, members of the Scott family were driving in from all over the northwest. The Scotts had been planning a reunion in Alpine for months, and on June 26, a Friday, 43 of them showed up. They spent the weekend picnicking, playing touch football and rafting on the Snake River. Like most families planning a weekend outdoors, they brought their own food along. The Scotts didn't like Wyoming water, so they brought their own water too. But the kids filled their squirt guns from a faucet and took a few sips from the barrel ends of their water pistols, and the adults began to drink from the tap when they ran out of bottled water. If there was something seriously wrong with Alpine water, they couldn't tell by the taste.

Regardless of how Alpine's water tasted, there was in fact something grievously--perhaps lethally--wrong with it. That something was a particularly dangerous strain of the E. coli bacterium called E. coli O157:H7, or O157 for short. Ordinarily a benign organism found in the intestines of human beings and animals, E. coli has a nasty ability to mutate and proliferate. Lately it has been proliferating with a vengeance. Five years ago, the fast-food industry was rocked when four children died and 500 other people fell ill after eating E. coli O157-contaminated hamburgers at Jack in the Box restaurants across the Pacific northwest. Massive as that outbreak seemed at the time, it was, for the bacterium, merely a shot across the bow.