A killer cold? Even the healthy may be vulnerable

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.

The vomiting, chills, fever -- "It must be the flu," he thought.

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.

"His lungs had filled up with water, it was hard to get oxygen into him," explains Dr. David Gilbert, an infectious disease expert and Spencer's physician at Providence. "Things got so bad, I thought we were at risk of losing him."

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."

At least 1,035 people in Oregon and a handful of other states have been infected by adenovirus so far this year. One of the largest outbreaks was at an Air Force base in Texas.

Adenoviruses are ubiquitous, scrappy bugs -- they exist on everything from pens to countertops to inside our noses. They are spread through contact with a surface, or through the air we breathe. Most people won't suffer life-threatening illness if exposed to adenovirus 14, and that strain of the virus is still pretty rare, but since few people have antibodies to it, there's opportunity for a new virus to spread rapidly throughout the population.

"Adenoviruses kill people," says Gilbert, adding that when these infectious viruses do spread, they spread fast.

"We are asking physicians is to be alert, not to panic -- but be alert," says the CDC's Erdman, who stresses that influenza remains a much larger public health concern, killing and causing far more serious illness annually than adenovirus.

I never thought this would happen to me. You'd think it only happens to unhealthy people," he says, pausing to find the words to finish his sentence. "I always thought of myself as a healthy guy until this happened.

"People need to be aware there's a killer out there