Word: spore
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that it's so enormous: nine stories tall and 10 million cu. ft. in volume, with a 100-ft. atrium at its center. Perhaps the most direct way to clean the place is with Sandia foam, a shaving cream-like decontaminant that works by oxidizing and destroying the anthrax spore's outer shell. But it's not clear how you would apply the killer suds to a structure as complex as the Hart, or how you would do it without gunking up computers and other equipment...
...order to be inhaled, cross-contaminated spores would have to be re-aerosolized, and that is hard to imagine, says William Patrick, a longtime Army biological-weapons researcher. "There's an electrostatic bond between the spore and the envelope," he says. "It takes a lot of energy to break the bond. They're just not going to be re-aerosolized in large enough quantities to provide an inhalation case." That would suggest that more than the three known letters have passed through the system. And given the tens of thousands of pieces of mail still impounded in Washington...
...doctor has ever written a prescription as sweeping as the one the Centers for Disease Control penned to head off the anthrax attack: 10 to 60 days of Cipro, a powerful antibiotic in the arsenal of modern medicine, for anyone who might have come anywhere near a spore. Nearly 20,000 Americans are already taking Cipro, and the number was shooting up--by the hundreds or even thousands--every time another anthrax "hot spot" was discovered...
...MILL THE SPORES Once the spores are dry, they are ground down to the smallest possible particle size, anywhere from one micron (one spore) to 20 microns. The process adds electrostatic charges to the particles, which makes them clump together...
...order to cause disease, at least 8,000 to 10,000 spores need to lodge deep in the lungs, in the tiniest air sacs known as alveoli. The warm, moist environment, and possibly the concentration of carbon dioxide in the lungs, stimulates the bacterium to emerge from its protective spore. As each bacterium reproduces, it releases toxins, which eventually spread throughout the body and destroy tissue and organs...