Truly an excellent article. I remember the Legionnaires’ Disease outbreak very clearly, but I read it as a series of disconnected news stories at the time. Seeing the whole narrative finally makes it all clear.

It also makes me sad.

Though she knew she needed a doctor, she feared what might happen if it came out why she was having symptoms so similar to the sick legionnaires’. A few years earlier, a doctor had betrayed her confidentiality and reported her to the police, causing her legal headaches that she did not want to repeat.

America.

Now I live in the Netherlands. Sex work is legal here. We have a right to privacy — a doctor who broke it would be severely disciplined.

After all, a decade prior, the New York City subway system had been seeded with a chemical agent in a vast joint CIA-Army test on the public. And just the previous year, in 1975, the country had learned that the CIA secretly dosed its own people with LSD, resulting in the death of at least one of its own employees.

If we had read this in a fiction novel, you would just laugh. But both of these statements are in fact completely true and have been extensively documented. And they did things that were just as depraved, and even close to being insane — like the perfectly named Operation Midnight Climax.

The saddest part? America learned some lessons from this — which they then threw away. And here we are in another epidemic, but this time much worse.

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Thanks for a brilliant article which cleared up a lot of questions that had been lingering in the back of my mind!