Two Cases of Fatal Inhalation Anthrax, One Associated with Sarcoidosis

Abstract

IN April, 1957, a twenty-eight-year-old man with a two-and-a-half-year history of confirmed sarcoidosis contracted fatal inhalation anthrax. The diagnosis was proved by pathological and bacteriologic studies. During the ensuing epidemiologic investigation, a previously proved case of fatal inhalation anthrax in a fifty-year-old housewife was uncovered. The woman may have been exposed to the same source of Bacillus anthracis as the man even though the cases occurred eight years apart.It is unusual to encounter cases of anthrax, either the cutaneous or the inhalation form, in which the source of the infecting organism is not obvious or readily discovered, for most . . .