I had a buddy who was in the Public Health Service. It is (or was) a pretty legit thing. The link to the military and the Navy goes back to before 1800. PHS grew out of the Marine Hospital Service. They were responsible for administering health care to the merchant marine as well as dealing with quarantining ships. That's why they got the military kit. My buddy John was based in Cincinnati, but relocated to Washington for a few years. He flew in and out of Wright-Patt on military transports.
John used to tell me about big cases he'd worked. There was a botulism outbreak somewhere in the Midwest where a truckload of frozen salmon was left at a Kroger's dock over Labor Day weekend and then the store manager decided to refreeze it and sell it. There was also a church social gone horribly wrong. Somebody with an infected cut on their hand sliced a bunch of lunch meat for the picnic and then stored it in a hot panel truck for 4 hours. John said the town heard ambulance sirens for 8 hours straight that night-- filled every hospital bed for several counties around and a lot of churchgoers never made it home.
It's funny somebody mentioned Herbert Hoover. John got into the Washington cocktail scene pretty heavy. They'd hit the bars after work and get thoroughly lubricated. One night, somebody at the table went off on Herbert Hoover. It was all the dirt we pretty well know to be true, but in 1965, these were the Secrets Man was Not Meant to Know. The other guys at the table had to shut the guy up for fear they'd all be picked up by the FBI. I think the loudmouth ended up disappearing in short order.
This was the same table of lounge lizards that made an important health discovery. They'd all go eat at the same Chinese restaurant on a pretty regular basis. They noticed that they were all getting weird symptoms from the food: sweating, palpitations, etc. There were some MDs in the group. They set to work on it. These were the guys who discovered that Chinese restaurants were liberally using MSG in their food. It was linked to a cluster of unexplained heart attacks nationwide.
