Dr. Charles Armstrong - credit National Library of Medicine
# 6222
We’ve a report today out of the UK of a suspected outbreak of Chlamydophila psittaci, or `Parrot Fever’, in Tayside, Scotland. While somewhat rare, this form of pneumonia usually responds well to antibiotics if it is diagnosed and treated in time.
It’s an interesting enough report (h/t Shiloh on FluTrackers), but unlikely to turn into a big story. It does, however, allow me to revisit a fascinating piece of American history.
The STV story is linked below, but when you return, I have the tale of how the 1929 Parrot Fever epidemic in the United States helped to change public health in America.
A number of patients thought to have contracted the bug from inhaling dust from dry bird droppings.
13 March 2012 16:04 GMT
Just 10 years after the end to the horrific Spanish flu pandemic, which claimed more than 600,000 American lives (and tens of millions worldwide), a new and mysterious pneumonia began to spread in the northeast.
It began when Simon Martin, a worker at the Chamber of Commerce in Annapolis, Maryland bought a parrot for his wife Lillian 10 days before Christmas.
Hoping to keep it a surprise, he enlisted his daughter (Edith) and son-in-law (Lee) to keep the bird until Christmas day, but by Christmas Eve, the bird began to show signs of illness.
By morning, in a scene reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, they had a late parrot on their hands.
Unfortunately, by New Years, Lillian, Edith & Lee were all seriously ill. A local doctor, who had read about a parrot fever outbreak in South America, put the pieces together about a week later.
In no time, newspapers had the story, and the country – still reeling from the Stock Market crash of October – and with memories of the 1918 Spanish Flu still relatively fresh – suddenly began to fear a new pandemic was on the way.
Sarasota Times Newspaper – Jan 8th, 1930
It didn’t help that 1929 also saw the biggest surge in influenza and pneumonia cases since the end of the great influenza. Newspapers, looking for something other than bad economic news to print, banged the `pandemic gong’ loudly.
By now, several employees at the pet shop were sick, and the mayor of Baltimore telegrammed the U.S. Public Health Service urgently requesting assistance. Within hours, Dr. Charles Armstrong – a pathologist with the USPHS – was put in charge of the investigation.
Three days later, more cases were detected hundred of miles away in Toledo, Ohio. By January 11th, there were two deaths and more than a dozen cases reported.
Lawrence Journal-World - Jan 11, 1930
The newspapers had a field day, and `Polly Pandemic Paranoia’ swept the nation.
Upon discovering that the pet store in Baltimore had sold 36 parrots before Christmas, Armstrong and his team began tracking them down. Meanwhile, the health department began notifying local health departments around the country to be on the look out for possible cases.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take long before it becomes apparent that only those in close contact with parrots were at risk, and that actual the number of cases was very, very small.
Curiously, most of the victims were elderly widows.
While their age may have predisposed them to pneumonia, it was also suggested that some of them allowed their birds pluck seeds from between their lips or teeth (a trick I can remember my Grandmother performing in the 1950s!).
After a week of screaming headlines, the newspapers did an about-face and began to ridicule the story – even going so as to begin printing parrot jokes. Overnight the Polly Pandemic became a national joke.
But the investigative work continued.
Within a week, the story would take horrific turn, as a number of the investigators began to fall seriously ill.
Several of them died.
On February 8th, lead investigator Charles Armstrong was admitted to the hospital with a 104 degree fever. George McCoy, director of the US Public Health Services’ very small and underfunded Hygienic lab, took over and in a daring move created a serum (this was before antibiotics were available) from the blood of a recovered patient, which he gave to Armstrong.
Armstrong would recover, and eventually wrote that there had been 169 cases of parrot fever nationwide, along with 33 deaths (including Dr. Daniel S. Hatfield and Dr. William Stokes of the Baltimore Health Department, and Henry (Shorty) Anderson of the Hygienic Lab)
In March, 9 more employees at the Hygienic Laboratory became sick, and McCoy ordered the lab evacuated, the test animals euthanized and incinerated, and the lab fumigated.
The outbreak was finally quashed, but out of it (and concerns over the recent rise in flu) came funding from Congress for a new, better staffed and equipped laboratory to replace the old Hygienic Lab.
They also gave it a new name: The National Institute of Health.
I’ve only covered the highlights of this fascinating story, and I would invite you to read Jill Lepore’s New Yorker article from June 1st, 2009 for a far more detailed and vivid account:
American Chronicles
Outbreaks, media scares, and the parrot panic of 1930.
by Jill Lepore June 1, 2009
Jill Lapore also was interviewed on NPR’s All things Considered:
Dr. Charles Armstrong (September 25, 1886 – June 23, 1967) would go on to investigate many more disease outbreaks in his career, and would contract St. Louis Sleeping Sickness (St. Louis encephalitis) during the 1934 epidemic (but would recover).
The NIH has a full biography of this early disease detective available for free download (PDF) at:
"Charles Armstrong, M.D.: A Biography"
You can also find other accounts of this famous episode in public health in the 1939 book, Modern Miracle Men by John Drury Ratcliff (available HERE on Google Books) and in 2007’s Government and public health in America by by Ronald Hamowy (also available through Google Books here).
And you can review some of the early history of the NIH, including the origins of the Hygienic Laboratory after the Civil War, at the following NIH site:
As a parting shot, I wrote about another `Parrot Fever’ outbreak in the Netherlands back in 2007, in my blog To You, My Heart Cries Out Chlamydia.
(No apologies for the title)
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