Philmont Quarantine Summer 1970

[RememberSchiff 3663]

Aug 8-9, 1970:

For 26 hours this weekend, Boy Scouts and their parents in all parts of the country knew that a 12‐year‐old boy had died of what New Mexico health officials called “a communicable disease.”

What most of these people did not know was that state health officials thought that the highly contagious form of plague, called pneumonic, was responsible for the boy's death.  He died Thursday while on a hike at the Philmont Boy Scout Ranch at Cimarron, near the Colorado border.

Because of their suspicion, health officials sealed off the ranch from contact with the outside world. The quarantine affected the 4,000 scouts and staff, including 244 boys and leaders from the metropolitan New York City area, camping at the Philmont Ranch.

“We assumed the worst,” Dr. Bruce Storrs of the State Health Department in Santa Fe said today in an interview.

“We had no alternative but to quarantine because the Scouts were a camp of transients coming and going daily to all parts of the country,” he said.

More at sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/08/09/archives/qua-rantine-over-at-scout-ranch-boy-is-found-to-have-died-of.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/08/10/archives/26-hours-of-tension-4000-scouts-and-a-plague-scare-in-a-new-mexico.html

Food for thought.