The treatment proved unnecessary, and tests later showed that Bush's condition was caused by Graves' disease, a noncontagious thyroid ailment that, coincidentally, also afflicts .
Though the new medications made it possible to release noncontagious patients from quarantine and isolation, politicians and the public were slow to recognize this.
The noncontagious disease has been positively diagnosed in only 32 servicemen so far, but nine of them have died.