Word: anthrax
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...this was a coordinated terrorist assault, though, it was pretty ineffectual. Given anthrax's lethal potential, an assault that caused one death, one nonfatal infection and two noninfectious exposures (a number that had risen to seven by Saturday, said American Media, though federal health officials wouldn't confirm it) is like the Sept. 11 hijackers' commandeering a motorcycle and driving it into a telephone booth. "Get real," says a photographer who works for tabloid newspapers. "If this was a terrorist incident, they would have put it in the ventilating system, and 400 people would have anthrax right...
...might well be tempted to hit the nation's media--which manage to embody both freedom and excess. Is al-Qaeda trying to panic U.S. journalists into doing the terrorists' work for them, spreading the fear that has now hit them where they work? Addressing the possibility that the anthrax scare is a follow-up to the attack on the World Trade Center, Vice President Dick Cheney wondered aloud, "Are they related? We don't know. We don't have enough evidence to be able to pin down that kind of connection. But...we have to be suspicious...
...horrors of bioterrorism by weeks of government warnings and media coverage, was ready to assume the worst. Even though a mass attack is considered unlikely, doctors in South Florida and New York have been besieged with demands for ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, the only antibiotic specifically approved for treating anthrax. Police all over the U.S. have been fielding calls reporting suspicious substances; on Friday a single precinct in New York City responded to three different alerts, quarantining one building in lower Manhattan for two hours. The city's emergency rooms were besieged as well. "There's a lot of anxiety," reports...
...Florida victims worked in American Media's mailroom, postal workers who sorted and delivered the company's mail have also been tested, and Postal Service employees are demanding blanket testing for everyone in the Boca Raton-area post offices. Mail clerks in half a dozen other cities with anthrax scares were also tested, and media outlets--including TIME--temporarily shut down mailrooms while they scrambled to beef up security. The Postal Service has issued new guidelines on how to do that (examples: don't open any mail on which the postmark and return address don't match; don't open...
Until last week, however, nobody had successfully used anthrax spores as weapons. Scientists' best idea of what such an attack might look like comes from a 1979 Soviet accident in Sverdlovsk. Dr. David Walker, chairman of the department of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was part of a U.S. team that visited Russia in 1992, just before Boris Yeltsin finally acknowledged the escape of anthrax from a bioweapons plant. Confronted with the evidence of an unprecedented 77 infections and 64 deaths, Walker and the others began thinking hard about the biology of anthrax...