Sick Sausages

Last autumn, before moving his 18 children, 13 grandchildren and divers in-laws from their drought-blighted farmstead in North Dakota to a 19-room house at Columbia Falls, Mont., Antone Hoerner killed & cured enough hogs to make sausages and ham to carry them through the winter. Shortly before Christmas nine well-fed Hoerners simultaneously took sick at their stomachs, vomited, developed fever. Doctors thought that they had eaten apples from which poisonous insecticide had not been thoroughly washed. As more Hoerners took sick with the same symptoms, doctors suspected typhoid fever. But by the time ten-year-old Daniel Hoerner died, doctors knew that an epidemic of trichinosis had befallen the huge household. The sausages taken from their North Dakota home contained embryos of the lint-like worms, one-eighth of an inch long, which cause this widespread (17,000,-ooo estimated U. S. victims), occasionally painful and exhausting, although seldom fatal disease. Cooking the sausages well would kill the embryos and prevent infection. But Mrs. Hoerner and neighbors who came in to help her as the family's epidemic spread, were in a hurry.

By last week when two more victims went to a hospital, 33 of the Hoerners had been infected, together with three nurses and a dozen neighbors.

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