An Outbreak of Hepatitis Traced to Food Contamination

Abstract

DURING a month's period in late 1961, 23 cases of hepatitis occurred among personnel at a Navy air station. The outbreak was characteristic of a common-source epidemic with a single wave of illness and was clearly related to exposure at the dining room of the Bachelor Officers' Quarters. An investigation, greatly facilitated by detailed military records, permitted the incrimination of a single food as the vehicle of infection.Few food-borne epidemics of hepatitis have, to date, been documented. Because of the extended incubation period of the disease, suspected food-borne epidemics have resisted investigation by conventional technics. In this study an . . .