1954 Seward outbreak

1954 Seward, Alaska outbreak: In 1954, in a small seaport town with a population of 3,000, there was an outbreak of 175 cases of a neurological disease that initially presented as typical poliomyelitis. Soon, medical personnel saw that this outbreak did not conform to the standardly accepted presentations of poliomyelitis. Doctors acknowledged that the number of cases may have been higher as they could not account for milder cases that went unreported.

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 * "Benign Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (Iceland Disease) in Alaska" in Northwest Medicine, Dec 1957