>From Monday's Washington Post Science Page:

   Mozart's Demise Tied to Meal

   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's premature death, the subject of speculation
   for more than 200 years, may have been caused not by rheumatic fever,
   heart attack or poisoning by court composer Antonio Salieri, but by
   eating tainted pork chops.

   "What do I smell...pork cutlets!" Mozart enthused in a letter to his
   wife Constanze written 44 days before he came ill "Che gusto (how
   delicious), I eat to your health."

   But perhaps not to his own.  Trichinosis, a parasitic disease
   undiscovered until nearly a quarter of a century after Mozart's
   death on Dec.  5, 1791, has an incubation of up to 50 days.

   Mozart's symptoms - fever, rash and swollen limbs - are consistent
   with trichinosis, noted researcher Jan V.  Hirschmann, of the Puget
   Sound Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Seattle.

   "Muscle pain...sometimes becomes so pronounced that the patients,
   refusing to move, appear paralyzed," wrote Hirschmann in the June 11
   Archives of Internal Medicine.  "Deaths typically occur in the third
   week of illness, from pneumonia or from neurological or cardiac
   complications."

   Over the years, Mozart's death in Vienna, two weeks before his
   36th birthday, has been attributed to many causes, including the
   now-discounted theory of arsenic poisoning by Salieri, the arch
   villain featured in the movie "Amadeus."

He should have been a vegetarian!

Darrell Acree
Washington, DC