Q Fever
Huebner's first work on Q Fever was a report he had done on an outbreak of 18 cases that occurred in early 1946 in an NIH laboratory, where he showed a correlation between a spike in cases and the preparation of antigens in yolk sacs, and he prepared another report on a group of 47 patients being treated for the condition at the Public Health Service Hospital in Baltimore. He was sent in spring 1947 to investigate an outbreak at milk farms in the Los Angeles area, in which there was a dense population of farms in which the animals had little space, creating what Huebner called "unpasturized cows". Huebner found the cause to be a member of the rickettsia family that was found in containers of unpasteurized milk. The cause was found to be Coxiella burnetii, with their findings published in 1948 in the American Journal of Public Health. Dairy farmers were upset by the insinuation that they were responsible for the outbreak and put pressure on local health officials to ask Huebner to leave the area.
Huebner found that the C. burnetii bacteria could survive temperatures of up to 60 °C (140 °F) in sealed containers for as long as 30 minutes, just below the levels used for vat pasteurization. This could mean that there was no way to verify that every particle within a vat was raised to the peak temperature and that pasteurization might not eliminate all of the bacteria in the milk being treated.
Read more about this topic: Robert Huebner
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