Thousands Fall Ill in Milwaukee; Residents Urged to Boil Water

Residents stripped stores clean of bottled water, schools covered drinking fountains and restaurants boiled large pots of water for washing food Thursday after thousands of people got sick, possibly from municipal water.

Health officials said a parasite could be to blame for the flu-like illness.

Mayor John O. Norquist recommended that residents of the Milwaukee area boil drinking water until the source of the problem is determined. Some 800,000 people depend on the water system, which is drawn from Lake Michigan.

The symptoms, including fever, vomiting and diarrhea, aren’t a serious risk for healthy people, but the illness poses a significant threat to people with immune systems weakened by AIDS and other illnesses, health officials said.

Many people decided to buy bottled water, and stores around the city had run out Thursday.

Roosevelt Harris, carrying four bottles of spring water, talked as if he had struck gold.

“I don’t want to get sick. I’ll buy it if it costs a dollar a gallon,” said Harris, 74, one of the first customers through the door when the downtown Woolworth’s opened.

Hospitals and businesses placed huge orders for bottled water and water coolers, and spring-water bottlers struggled to meet the demand.

“We’re working frantically to get enough empty bottles and add shifts to meet demand,” said Todd Peterson, president of Chippewa Springs Ltd. “Some of our suppliers were ringing even before the start of business.”

Dr. Thomas Schlenker, medical director of the city’s health department, said so far tests on 23 patients who drank tap water showed they had Cryptosporidium, a microscopic parasite that produces flu-like symptoms. However, the cause of the outbreak had not been pinpointed.

Hundreds of people sought treatment at hospital emergency rooms, but many more are sick, Schlenker said.

Cryptosporidium occurs naturally in the intestinal tracts of animals, and authorities were checking the city’s slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants for contamination.