In 1994 I spent the entire year working for the company which operates the concession facilities in Zion National Park in southern Utah. At the peak of the season there are generally about 150 people employed by the company. During the late summer months about a third of the company came down with what I can only guess was some sort of viral infection, but it was unlike any illness that any of us had ever experienced. In the beginning stages, the person who contracted it invariably said that they felt “funny.” Not sick, just “funny.” That lasted a day, and then the next day a generalized feeling of fatigue and malaise set in, but it was never debilitating and there was never any fever involved. Nobody was ever bedridden because of it—we all just went about our business, albeit feeling crappy. The most notable thing about the illness was excruciating nerve pain, usually in the leg, which would come on suddenly, last for about 15 seconds, and then go away. There were also psychological effects—the victim had the irrational belief that the illness would never go away. It all cases the illness took a full three to four weeks to run its course, and then everybody made a complete recovery. So what did we all have?
Heck, I haven’t offered a WAG in GQ in some time: Guillain–Barré syndrome
Because not everyone may be passingly familiar with a rare French-named disease that strikes .001% of people annually, here’s a handy link.
Mass hysteria.
Nerve pain? Are you sure? Because there are a lot of disease organisms that can cause a single bout of myositis, commonly in the legs. No fever is weird – almost all infectious agents cause fever in some patients. I’m kinda pulling this out of my ass, but the symptoms remind me of some sort of poisoning, not infectious disease – but IANAD.
Guess you missed the WAG part.
Also, please note I intended to be sarcastic, especially in light of how far the quality of GQ answers has sunk over the years: Chock full o’ WAGs and anecdotes (and that’s on a good day).
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Maybe it was Lupus?
This is what I was going to guess, only a bit more politely.
The term “mass hysteria” tends to connote something more crazy/irrational than what was really at work here, but the phenomenon is quite real, and it doesn’t have to involve something like a religious miracle or ecstatic vision. It can be quite mundane, such as a group of people unconsciously influencing each other to feel “funny” and feel pain in the legs, etc.
So my vote is on a psychologically-rooted disease meme unconsciously spread from one employee to another.
Disclaimer: IANAD, IANA Psychologist.
Except for the nerve pain it sounds like an inner ear virus. We had something like that a few years back here in Northern Virginia.
The leg pain sounds like chiggers, but without the itch. I’m guessing it was somehting chigger-like, which ran it’s season. Did it disappear about the time that cold set in?
24 hour Clown Lupis. The first symptom was that they all felt “funny” the first day.
Probably ran over each others legs with the car and didn’t remember, hence the leg pain.
No, we had a very mild winter that year, and that part of Utah is very low in elevation to begin with. The first snow didn’t come until late November, I think. It started among the foodservice employees, but spread to the rest of the company over the course of about a month. I’m going to PM a facebook friend who worked with me back then and see if she remembers any more about it than I do.
Lupus?
Did the bridge of your nose feel prickly?
Did the thought of Shrimp/shellfish make you vomit?
Since no-one else is saying it yet:
“It’s never lupus!”
What altitude is Zion at ? (I’ve been there but don’t remember) Could it just be the affects of altitude ?
About 6000 feet. Way too low for altitude sickness.
I’m wondering how you knew that you had no fever – did you actually check with a thermometer? Because many people can have a mild fever without really noticing it particularly. Seems more likely that you did have a mild fever, that never became acute.
Herpes? The malaise and crappy feeling could fit with just about any viral thing. But some people with herpes do experience shooting leg pains (or so I’ve heard). Of course, you did not mention the most obvious herpes symptom, but some of the afficted may have been admitting to “leg pains” instead of leg pains.
And you gotta admit - 150 concession works, national park, tail end of peak season, intoxicating natural beauty. If it wasn’t some sort of VD, I’d really have to wonder what the hell you all were doing out there.
BTW - Washoe, as in ASL chimpanzee (RIP)? Cool!
Wasn’t that about the time of the hantavirus outbreak in the southwest? You say food service workers got it first? They’d have the most exposure to mice/rats…
No, it’s more likely that the illness was psychogenic, which explains why there were no objective symptoms such as fever.