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The potato fields that roll up to the edge of New Sweden were still dusted with snow on Sunday, April 27, 2003. Even by the standards of northern Maine it had been a tough winter, and the old furnace in the parsonage of the Gustaf Adolph Evangelical Lutheran Church was giving up the ghost. The church council had gathered after services to decide who would install a new heater. Council member Dick Ruggles, a 64-year-old retired ironworker, grabbed a cup of coffee and headed into the meeting.He lasted about five minutes. "I asked a question of one of the members," says Ruggles, "and before he could answer, I had to leave and go to the men's room." When the vomiting briefly let up, Ruggles staggered out to find his wife, who had been chatting over coffee in the kitchen with Erich Margeson. "Fran," he said, "I have to go home now!"
Home was a white clapboard farmhouse just up the road, but Fran had to stop the car twice for Dick. Once there, the violent nausea continued, and severe diarrhea added to Dick's woes. When Fran went into the bedroom to change out of her church clothes, she suddenly felt sick herself. "I didn't make it back to the bathroom," she says. "I just could not stop vomiting."
Sometime between three and four that afternoon, the phone rang. It was Erich Margeson's wife, Alana, calling to say she'd just taken Erich to the hospital. Erich, a 30-year-old potato farmer, was also violently ill. Soon came another call: Dale Anderson, who had been at church, was sick too. When Barb Bondeson called around five, Dick and Fran were too ill to speak. Barb called Fran's sister, Julie Adler, who had skipped church that day. She raced over with her son, who had to carry Dick to the car.
With a population that hovers just over 600, New Sweden has no hospital of its own. Fortunately, an emergency room is just eight miles away, in the town of Caribou. Staffers at the Cary Medical Center take pride in their high-tech, point-of-care service. But Cary's greatest asset is its close relationship with the community. Its doctors know their patients from the local cross-country ski trails, not the medical charts. With only 37 beds and a small staff of nurses, Cary is set up for car accidents and cardiac arrests -- not outbreaks of violent illness.
Yet an outbreak is exactly what Cary had by Sunday evening, as a total of 12 church members showed up retching and gasping. Patty Carson, the hospital's infection control officer, remembers, "My first thought was, 'Some poor old lady who made the potato salad is gonna be so upset.' " Thinking fast, Carson alerted the state's Bureau of Health to a possible food poisoning in New Sweden. Then she grabbed a notepad and headed for the patient wards, looking for answers.
It didn't take long for Carson to change her mind about the cause of the outbreak. The patients had eaten a variety of food in the church kitchen -- tuna sandwiches, sponge cake, banana bread with icing -- most of it left over from a bake sale the day before. The only common denominator was the coffee; every patient had sipped a cup, and they all recalled it tasted funny --"bitter," "metallic" or just plain "bad." And all got sick within an hour of drinking the brew. As a microbiologist, Carson knew that food-borne organisms typically take several hours or more to cause illness. And she doubted that any dangerous bacteria could thrive in the hot, acidic environment of a coffee urn.
Dr. Daniel Harrigan, the ER physician on duty, was coming to the same conclusion. "These people had blood pressures that were much lower than you would expect from food poisoning," he says. The most critical patient was Reid Morrill, the church's head usher and a beloved local character known for his homemade ice cream and for once hitting a hole in one at the Caribou Country Club. Morrill, 78, was still recovering from cardiac bypass surgery earlier in the year. Dr. Harrigan golfed with Morrill; now his links partner was hooked up to a ventilator. Recalls Harrigan: "I told Patty that this has to be a poisoning of some sort, and to call the poison center."
Morrill was one of four patients, including Fran Ruggles, admitted to Cary that night. Margeson and four others felt well enough after a few hours to go home. Convinced they were not contagious (and facing a shortage of beds), the hospital released them. Three additional patients, Dick Ruggles among them, needed more serious care but were stable enough to be transferred to the closest acute-care facility, Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, 170 miles south.
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