IT WAS STILL early when Larry Bush reached the gurney in the emergency room of JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, Florida, part of a strip of towns that stretches from Miami to West Palm Beach. Bush was the hospital’s chief of staff and an infectious diseases physician, on his way to a regular morning meeting, but some ER physicians had asked that he drop by. A 63-year-old man named Bob Stevens had been brought in at about 2:30 am with a roaring fever. Now he was comatose and plugged into a ventilator, with his frightened wife by his side.

The wife told Bush their story. As he recalled it later, she said they lived a few miles away, closer to the ocean. Her husband worked in Boca Raton for a company that published supermarket tabloids, but they had been out of state for a week, visiting their daughter. He had started to feel ill the day before on the long drive home, and had gone to bed as soon as they arrived. He had woken her up in the middle of the night, wandering around the house, confused.

Fever, confusion, rapid collapse: That sounded to Bush like meningitis, an infection in membranes around the spinal cord and brain that can be caused by several organisms. He headed to the hospital’s lab to check test results, and found himself staring down a microscope at one he had not expected to see: strings of bright-purple rod-shaped bacilli, threaded end to end like train cars on a track.

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