From The Boston Globe
IT BEGAN with a broken leg. On a long journey through India, a Nevada resident in her 70s fractured her femur. Complications took her to several Indian hospitals. Eventually, she returned to the United States, but her problems followed her home. In August of last year, she had to be hospitalized once again. In Reno, she presented with systemic inflammatory response syndrome — a condition that can produce a racing heart, frantic breathing, and other symptoms. The syndrome often marks a powerful immune response to an infection. So her doctors looked for a microbe that might have provoked her increasingly devastating response…