Turkey Trouble

On a rough picnic table outside the Oregon State Game Commission's checking station on Sauvie Island in the Columbia River last week, scientists busily cut up wild ducks. The doctors took out the livers, lungs, spleens and air sacs of 20 birds for laboratory examination. From another 30 they took blood samples from under the wing, then freed them.

The scientists were disease detectives at work on a medical whodunit that began last month when a physician at the Portland Veterans Administration Hospital phoned the State Board of Health to report "a patient under treatment for pneumonia of an unusual character." The doctor suspected psittacosis (parrot fever), and was right. It turned out that the patient, a laborer living in a skid row hotel, had been hired to help treat sick turkeys at a 7,000-bird farm on Sauvie Island. With proper antibiotic treatment the laborer is recovering, but 2,000 of the turkeys died. Of 1,500 turkeys at a smaller farm near Scappoose, 250 died.

As health officers swung into action, checking turkey handlers for signs of ornithosis infection,* they found an alarmingly high rate of human illness. By last week they had recorded 60 suspected cases (though some could prove to be viral pneumonia). The farms turned up only seven cases of apparent ornithosis. The situation was worse at a rendering plant, where turkeys that had died of disease were shipped to be boiled down for tallow, feed and fertilizer. At this plant, out of 32 employees, 24 became ill, a dozen hospitalized. At other plants there were 29 cases. Two died, but State Epidemiologist Samuel B. Osgood would only say that ornithosis was "a factor" in their deaths.

Cause of ornithosis is a microbe, on whose nature and classification the experts are not agreed. Most regard it as a large virus. Parakeet lovers, like turkey raisers, apparently get it by breathing infected dust particles; processing plant workers get it from handling the viscera. Oregon has recorded no case of the rare human-to-human infection. Birds, like man, can be cured with aureomycin and Terramycin. (Before antibiotics, 20% of human cases ended in death.)

The Sauvie Island outbreak was stopped by putting almost a pound of antibiotics in every ton of turkey feed. But where the turkeys get the virus remained a mystery. The Columbia River's wild ducks were suspected because they mooch free meals in the turkey runs. But Dr. Donald Mason (on loan to Oregon from the U.S. Public Health Service) admitted: "We may never know whether the ducks gave the disease to the turkeys, or vice versa."

* Ornithosis is the overall name for a disease transmitted by many species of birds, notably the parrot family, game birds and pigeons. First detected in parrots (Psittaci), it was called psittacosis, and the name has stuck.

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