A high school varsity athlete, a sturdy guy with a health history blissfully free of blips, 18-year-old Joseph Spencer had little reason to think anything was seriously wrong when he got sick last April.
Within hours, Spencer's fever was 104 degrees. Within days, he was in the intensive care unit at Providence Portland Medical Center in Oregon with full-blown pneumonia. Spencer's doctor was afraid this sturdy teenage boy was going to die.
But as perplexing as what would make a hardy young man so sick -- so quickly -- was his diagnosis: adenovirus, the virus that usually causes nothing worse than a nasty cold.
"In the past, we considered adenovirus a 98-pound weakling," says Dr. Dean Erdman, leader of the respiratory diagnostic program at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. "But adenovirus is causing severe disease and, in some cases, death in normal, healthy people."
"People need to be aware there's a killer out there."
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