1956 Massachusetts outbreak

When an American airman who was affected in the 1955 Akureyri, Iceland outbreak returned home, a similar secondary epidemic occurred in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

"In 1966, when I was an intern in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, I had as a patient a 27-year-old married nurse, who had been hospitalized with Iceland disease as a student nurse in 1958. She had been one of half a dozen people in the community to take ill with the disease, brought into the area by an American serviceman returning home from Iceland with it. My patient, admitted for evaluation of neck and shoulder pain, had been having musculoskeletal system symptoms since her illness eight years earlier."