109 PEOPLE IN CALIFORNIA GET BOILS FROM BACTERIA May 1, 2001

ABCNews.com reports: “A trip to the beauty salon was anything but pretty for more than 100 women in California. A contaminated pedicurist's footbath led to unsightly and potentially disfiguring boils on 109 customers' legs ranging in size from a nickel to a half-dollar, a disease investigator with the federal Centers for Disease Control concluded. The infections can be treated slowly with antibiotics, but can be painful and unsightly, and may leave scarring. Most people infected in the California outbreak had multiple sores or boils. One woman had 37 boils. ‘It was something that caught everyone by surprise; it could have happened really anywhere,’ said Kevin Winthrop, epidemic intelligence service officer for the CDC.
State and federal health investigators believe a germ known as Mycobacterium fortuitum was the source of contamination that caused boils and lesions on the legs of as many as 108 women and one man last fall. Health officials also are investigating another case in the San Diego area.

Winthrop said officials at the CDC had heard of individual cases in which people were attacked by the bacterium through an infection or a traumatic wound, but they had never heard of a communal outbreak of this type. ‘It's well known that these types of bacteria inhabit potable water systems, but they're normally found in very low concentrations, and not high enough to cause infection. This was an unusually high concentration of the bacteria,’ Winthrop said…”