After several weeks of not being sure what Diane had (they tested her for 
Legionairre's Disease, AIDS, the new virus being spread by mice in the 
Southwest and others). They finally gave her an ANKA test, which showed 
positive. She was in such bad shape that they couldn't even get the test 
taken until she improved a little.
After five weeks at a local hospital, they were able to stabilize her enough 
to get her to the Maryland University Medical Center, in Baltimore. She 
continued to have hemmorages in the lungs. Her kidneys and liver had shut 
down. Finally, the night before she died, she suffered a massive stroke. She 
was also suffering from a couple ofyeast infections that proved quite 
stubborn.
The autopsy said basically that she had Wegner's and the infections...but 
that they couldn't find one single reason why she died. In fact, the doctor 
(a very kind doctor in the ER, who volunteered to attend the autopsy and then 
go over the results with me, in English) actually said that she "shouldn't 
have died". This doesn't make much sense to me.
My wife is of the strong opinion that researchers should look into the 
interaction of medications in making the disease progress more rapidly. Every 
time she got medicine for one of the individual symptoms, she got worse and 
in more pain. So far we haven't been able to get a doctor to show much 
interest in our theory.
Another possible, if far-fetched, question is, did she do anything different 
from other people that might have triggered this? Or did she have some aspect 
of her lifestyle that was identical to other victims? For example, she hated 
any kind of seafood. The rest of the family loves it. Is there something in 
seafood (iodine?) that acts as a barrier to WGM?
We'd love to be able to come up with a complete profile of her lifestyle and 
also profile the lifestyles of other victims to see if by any chance there's 
a correlation in some way. I realize that this is pretty far out, but it 
seems like a logical methodology to possible gain more info.
Any comments?
Thanks for your interest. We appreciate your input.
Dick
--- Maximus/2 3.01
---------------