Inspections

Early yesterday morning, inspection teams from the state and city joined investigators from the Harvard Dining Services, the University's facilities maintenance department and the Environmental Health and Safety office at the Union. In all, nearly two dozen people were investigating, Berry said.

In addition to water tests performed by the city, three dozen samples of leftover Union food from Tuesday as well as stool from dining service employees and sick students were being examined. Some students also received blood tests, Rosenthal said.

Test results are expected today and tomorrow.

Some samples were being tested at the UHS clinical laboratory, while others were sent to Morrell Associates in Marshfield, Mass. Morrell officials declined to comment last night.

But yesterday ended with more answers than questions about the cause of the epidemic. "At this point, we're stumped," said an official from Harvard's Environmental Health and Safety office, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

College health experts said they could recall few times when a college had been struck by such a large epidemic. The size of the epidemic, some said, argues for an explanation other than food poisoning.

"It's really unusual the way food is prepared in dining services to have food poisoning in that large a number of people," said Dr. Harris Faigel '56, director of the Brandeis health service for 19 years and treasurer of the New England College Health Association. "Usually, you have food prepared in a series of small batches, and you do not contaminate it all."

Rosenthal said he spoke yesterday with his predecessor as UHS director, Dr. Warren E.C. Wacker. Wacker was unable to recall a campus epidemic of such severity, Rosenthal said.

"When you have a large group of people eating together or living together, there is always the possibility that something like this can happen," said Sean Fitzpatrick, spokesperson for the state department of public health. "But it certainly is newsworthy when you have this amount of folks affected."

Ed Dowling, a chemist with the Cambridge water department, said preliminary tests yesterday strongly suggest the epidemic was not caused by anything in Harvard's water supply. Water department officials were unable to find any evidence of coliform bacteria or other common types of contamination, he said.

At the same time, Dowling cautioned that final results of water tests will not become available until this afternoon.

"We found no problems today," he said, "but just as a precaution we took a sample."

Dr. Melvin H. Chalfen, the commissioner of health and hospitals for Cambridge, supported Dowling's statements. He said there had been no suggestion of water contamination in any part of the city's supply, but cautioned that tests are not yet complete.

Progress yesterday came in the form of possibilities ruled out rather than new leads developed. Harvard, city and state officials, who worked together in a tandem that one source happily labeled "efficient," said they had been able to rule out some kinds of food poisoning. They also said the epidemic could not be attributed to any problem in a Chemistry 10 labs, as some students had suspected.