“Sooner or later, all these episodes were established as Q fever.” After the war, research showed “the extraordinary versatility of C. burnetii as a parasite,” infecting dairy cows in California, sheep in Greece, rodents in North Africa, and bandicoots back home in Queensland. It passed from one species to another in the form of minuscule airborne particles, often dispersed from the placenta or the dried milk of an infected female animal, inhaled, and then activated through the lungs, or taken directly into the bloodstream from the bite of a tick. As he said, it was versatile.
