Posted on 11/05/2001 12:18:59 PM PST by t-shirt
Edited on 04/29/2004 1:59:31 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The public post office, located in an underground shopping area, had been undergoing testing in the weeks since an anthrax-contaminated letter arrived October 15 at Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's congressional office.
Two of 17 samples taken from the facility Tuesday tested positive for the bacteria. Subsequent tests show no positive results at the site.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Pray for America.
Many reports and intelligence sources seem to think smallpox attacks will begin next in this period of escalating violence.
Associated Press
TAMARAC, Nov. 4 -- The terms on the overhead projector in Maurice Baum's class read like plot lines in a chilling movie script: Anthrax. Botulism. Smallpox.
A group of nurses and hospital staffers sit shoulder-to-shoulder in a cramped conference room, hanging on Baum's every word as he tells them how to prepare for bioterrorism scenarios once thought unimaginable.
"You're on the front lines. You may not be in Afghanistan. But you're on the front lines," Baum says with a staccato that complements his short-cropped, military-style haircut. "The first place where we have mass casualties or even limited casualties or hoaxes -- the first place they're coming to is the hospital."
Welcome to Decontamination 101 at University Hospital and Medical Center in this Fort Lauderdale suburb.
In courses offered by professionals like Baum, hospitals are responding to challenges once relegated to the worst case scenario, forcing them to upgrade emergency response plans, beef up security and prepare for the worst.
"It clearly has changed people's decision-making and they're rushing to upgrade their knowledge and equipment," said James Bentley of the American Hospital Association, representing more than 4,000 hospitals nationally. "Everybody knows this is unprecedented."
Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and anthrax scares in South Florida, Baum taught his seminar about six times a year, helping hospitals learn how to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical patient exposures.
His company, Environmental Research & Restoration in Hollywood, once faxed fliers to hospitals throughout Florida and the southeast to advertise his classes. Some kindly asked to be removed from his mailing list.
"Now they're calling us, begging us to schedule a class," said Baum, who's booked through December.
Baum's phones ring constantly and he now teaches his courses three times a week, handing out black binders labeled "Decon One" and taking participants through the proper steps of decontaminating patients exposed to hazardous materials.
Before the recent terrorist attacks, Bentley said hospitals' main example was the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on a Tokyo subway that killed 12 people. Now hospitals have to prepare for the possibility of dozens of infected people rushing to their emergency rooms.
"People didn't wait. They just simply streamed out of the subway and went to the hospital," he said of the attack in Japan. "Now hospitals are environments that are going to have to deal with a population who have not been through that doorway."
Baum's words resonate in Tamarac, only a few miles south of Boca Raton, site of the nation's first anthrax exposure and the death of a tabloid photo editor.
William Voss, a hazardous material officer based in Miami, said the efforts by hospitals to reorganize their emergency plans represents the biggest response in South Florida since Hurricane Andrew ravaged the region in 1992.
"It just pushes disaster events from the 'hurricane scenario' to the 'anything can happen scenario,"' Voss said.
Representing departments throughout the hospital, 22 employees take Baum's class, preparing to share what they've learned with co-workers.
University Hospital, a medium-sized facility with 317 beds, began planning for this scenario before the attacks. About 14 workers took Baum's class during the summer of 2000 and the hospital conducted a drill in June to prepare for the decontamination of 10 patients.
Since the attacks and anthrax scares, the hospital has doubled the number of respirators used to combat anthrax and other germs and flooded employees with information and flowcharts on how to handle a decontamination incident.
"The e-mails are just flying like crazy," said Carol McMullen, the nursing director of the hospital's emergency room.
In an emergency scenario, McMullen would coordinate their efforts, helping to decontaminate victims in a shower with an outdoor entrance connected to the emergency room.
Since anthrax was found at American Media, Inc., about 20 people have arrived at the hospital frightened they might have been exposed to a suspicious white powder, among the dozens of false alarms in South Florida that have taxed hazardous materials crews and kept hospitals buzzing.
In his class, Baum leads employees through the proper way of setting up decontamination areas inside and outside the hospital, how to properly wear Saranex hazmat suits and hypothetical situations involving germs.
To show the ease with which a germ can spread through the air, Baum secretly tags some participants with theft powder. He then darkens the room and places a black light near his students' hands and face as the powder -- used by police to track counterfeit money -- glows on the skin.
Baum started the company during the 1970s, offering training in hazardous materials spills and decontamination. He began working more closely with hospitals in recent years, imparting his wisdom on staffs throughout the South.
During the uncertainty, Baum hopes he can provide the training that was once relegated to a passing mention in medical classrooms years ago.
"A lot of the things that we never thought we would face we have to look at today as a reality and be prepared," Baum said. "Pray for the best and be prepared for the worst."
November 5, 2001 Posted: 11:34 AM EST (1634 GMT)
ATLANTA (AP) -- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has vaccinated some of its health workers against smallpox as a precaution in case they need to investigate a terrorist attack involving the deadly virus, a spokesman said.
While the CDC has no evidence that anyone is readying a terrorist attack using smallpox, which was eradicated outside laboratories 21 years ago, officials of the federal agency say the virus is so dangerous that it is important they be prepared.
"We are putting together several teams that could be quickly dispatched to the field if we did see a suspected case of smallpox," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said Sunday.
The agency expects a number of false alarms as doctors heighten their suspicion of anthrax, smallpox and other diseases, said Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, the CDC director.
Last week, the CDC vaccinated about 140 members of epidemiological teams that can be sent at a moment's notice to examine suspected cases of smallpox.
This week, the CDC will begin a series of training courses on smallpox for some employees and state and local health workers.
The contagious virus is known to survive only in laboratories in the United States and Russia. However, germ warfare experts suspect that other countries, including North Korea and Iraq, may have secretly obtained stocks.
Health experts worry about smallpox because it can spread quickly from person to person and has a high death rate. The infection is characterized by a rash and a fever of at least 102 degrees.
Many Americans are susceptible to smallpox because they were never vaccinated, or were vaccinated but have decreased protection because the vaccine has worn off. The United States stopped smallpox immunizations in 1972.
Skinner said the CDC is not calling for public vaccinations now.
Since smallpox was eradicated, the CDC has sent epidemiologists to investigate suspect illnesses a few times a year.
Smallpox experts were sent to evaluate specific cases three times last month, said Dr. James Hughes, who directs the agency's center for infectious diseases. None of the patients had smallpox.
November 5, 2001 Jeet Heer
National Post
While the U.S. postal service contemplates the use of irradiation to disinfect letters that may contain anthrax, historians note this high-tech solution is merely the most recent approach to an old problem.
"The terrorist use of anthrax in the mail is a new twist, but governments have had to grapple with diseases being spread by mail for centuries," says historian Patrick Connor, who studies colonial North American social history at York University in Toronto.
"In fact, as long ago as 1885 the Public Health Service of the United States did experiments to find out what is the best way to disinfect mail from anthrax bacilli, although the biggest fear was always smallpox, cholera and yellow fever," Dr. Connor said.
The earliest cases of mail being disinfected occurred in Mediterranean port cities such as Venice in the 16th century. Because these cities were the hub of global commerce, they were a gateway for diseases and plagues from across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. As a result, the Venetian Republic initiated a policy of fumigating mail on quarantined ships with noxious smoke and fumes, a method that was likely ineffective.
In an article in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine in 1980, scholars Emmet F. Pearson and Wyndham Miles listed more than 100 examples of authorities in the United States disinfecting mail. The earliest examples took place in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1647. Dipping letters in vinegar was the most commonly used method in this era, though people complained it made some letters difficult to read.
As technology and medical science developed, more elaborate methods of disinfection emerged. According to Messrs. Pearson and Miles, "the most massive incidence of mail fumigation was done at the Waycross, Ga., disinfection station where most of the mail coming north from Florida was routed during the yellow fever epidemic of 1888.
Several special boxcars were dispatched to Waycross. With chicken wire stretched across the cars to hold the mail, sulphur was burned in the cars for several hours. In other instances, live steam from locomotives was piped into the cars. After fumigation, mail was sometimes sprayed with bichloride of mercury."
The boxcar method also raised the ire of mail recipients because letters were punched full of holes so the fumigants could get inside.
In Canada, mail disinfection was initiated by French colonists in the 17th century and continued long thereafter.
In 1876, Dr. William Osler, a legendary figure in the history of Canadian medicine, was recovering from smallpox in Montreal. "You need not be afraid of this letter," he wrote to a friend, "I will disinfect it before sending."
Once cleaned, letters were often stamped "disinfected." Letters bearing this mark are now prized by stamp collectors.
"The history of mail disinfection is in many ways reassuring," Dr. Connor observes. "The anthrax threat is serious, but mankind has had to deal with much larger threats from the natural world. ... But rather than panic, people tried to make the best of a bad situation, disinfecting the mail with whatever tools they had."
New York Daily News
November 5, 2001
Kenneth R. Bazinet
WASHINGTON
he government has begun giving precautionary smallpox inoculations to federal emergency medical teams that would be the first to respond to an outbreak of the killer virus, a U.S. medical official said yesterday.
"We must be prepared for the use of smallpox as a bioterrorism weapon," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Fauci stressed on CBS' "Face the Nation" that there's no evidence the U.S. faces a smallpox terror attack.
But he confirmed U.S. health officials have begun to take several steps to increase the stockpile of 15.4 million doses of smallpox vaccines, including a study — funded by the National Institutes of Health — to see whether existing doses of the vaccine can be diluted to increase the government stockpile.
The feds have already ordered fresh doses of the smallpox vaccine, but the diluted reserves could possibly be used until the new batches are ready.
About 140 people have so far been vaccinated against the virus that the U.S. declared in 1972 to be eradicated, The New York Times reported yesterday.
Original Publication Date: 11/5/01
How long do smallpox vaccines last? Anyone know? Many of us got them as kids, but I have no idea if mine is still in effect. (I highly doubt it, but have never heard).
About ten years, I've heard. So I guess mine wore off before I left gradeschool.
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Sheesh!! Mine too!! (and that was a long time ago!)
Breaking: US Congress Subpoena Orders Ashcroft To Release Clinton Evidence on Sept. 11, 2001 http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b99d9b10b76.htm
-------------------------------------
5 follow-up threads to US Congress Subpoena Orders Ashcroft To Release Clinton Evidence on Sept. 11, 2001:
Breaking: US Congress Subpoena Orders Ashcroft To Release Clinton Evidence on Sept. 11, 2001 – Thread 2 http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b9a84661c0d.htm
Will Ashcroft Obey House Subpoena Commanding Evidence by11th or KeepProtecting Clinton?Thread 2 1/2 http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b9bd4a06221.htm
US Congress Subpoena Orders Ashcroft To Release Clinton Evidence on Sept. 11, 2001 - Re-Post http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3ba0411b092f.htm
US Congress Subpoena Orders Ashcroft To Release Clinton Evidence on 9/11/01 - Re-Post Thread 2 http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3bb623972397.htm
(Congress' Sept 11, 00 Subpoena For Clinton's Criminal Evidence Blocked By Bush Exec Order)(Thead4)http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/563206/posts
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