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 ...
Yes. They made a PCR probe for one of the unique plasmids contained in virulent forms of anthrax.
t-shirt's handy!
25 posted on 11/5/01 4:39 PM Pacific by stainlessbanner
Good with a rifle too! LOL :)
Here's another story:
Postal worker, once near death from anthrax, leaves hospital
November 5, 2001 Posted: 5:37 p.m. EST (2237 GMT)
(CNN) -- A New Jersey postal worker who contracted inhalation anthrax was released from the hospital Monday, and she delivered a message of hope for Americans shaken by the bioterrorism mystery that has infected 17 people with the bacteria.
"Even though we have been confronted by a deadly disease, there is recovery, there is hope," said Norma Wallace at a news conference at Virtua-Memorial Hospital. "We don't have to succumb to it. We can fight together. We can stand together."
Wallace, who spent 18 days in the hospital and was near death at one point, left with her adult children and other family members.
A new CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll finds only 1 in 10 Americans are very fearful that a member of their family will fall victim to anthrax. Almost two-thirds are not at all worried that a family member would be exposed to anthrax.
Of the 17 people who have been infected with anthrax, four have died of inhalation anthrax and six more are battling that form of the disease. Seven other people have been diagnosed with cutaneous anthrax.
Wallace was a mail handler at Trenton's postal distribution center in Hamilton Township, where three anthrax-laced letters are believed to have been processed. All three -- two to New York media offices and one to Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle in Washington -- were postmarked in Trenton.
Anthrax by the numbers
17 total anthrax infections
• 10 cases inhalation anthrax (4 dead)
• 7 cases cutaneous anthrax
Source: CDC/CNN
Latest developments
• Investigators are looking at a few mail routes in West Trenton, New Jersey, where the three letters may have been mailed, a U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokeswoman said Monday.
• The West Trenton postal facility was due to reopen Tuesday, but the Hamilton Township processing center remained closed. A post office in Princeton, New Jersey, resumed operations Monday.
• A State Department mail handler infected with inhalation anthrax is out of intensive care and "improving steadily" but is still hospitalized, department spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday.
• A civilian post office within the Pentagon complex was closed after the discovery of anthrax traces over the weekend. Six employees who work at the branch are on Cipro, an antibiotic used to treat anthrax, as a precaution. Authorities are notifying those who rent post office boxes at the site that there had been contamination.
The facility does not process mail for the Pentagon but did receive mail from the Brentwood mail-processing center in Washington. Two employees from the Brentwood facility -- which processed the anthrax-laden letter sent to Daschle -- died of inhalation anthrax, and two others are hospitalized with the same form of the disease.
New York Times
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — Officials said today that anthrax spores had been found in two mail boxes at a post office on a commercial concourse inside the Pentagon.
According to Pentagon officials, one of the boxes was rented by an unidentified member of the Navy; the other was unassigned.
The office was decontaminated Sunday, and "retesting results were all negative," said a statement issued at the Pentagon.
The facility, which is served by the big Brentwood postal plant in Washington that was closed after anthrax spores were found there on Oct. 15, does not process official Defense Department mail. That task is handled by other facilities, which have tested negative for anthrax.
Reports of anthrax traces in government buildings across the capital have become almost routine in the past three weeks, since a contaminated letter was opened in the office of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader.
It is also fairly common for final tests to show that anthrax spores were not present where they were first thought to be. Officials said today there were none in the mail rooms of the Food and Drug Administration in Rockville, Md., nor in a Washington building that houses some offices of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Voice of America. Preliminary tests had seemed to indicate the presence of spores.
So far, all instances of contamination in the Washington area are believed to be linked to the Brentwood mail center.
The Daschle letter, whose anthrax potency was underestimated early on, is known to have passed through the center. Anthrax was discovered in the center, where four employees were infected, two fatally.
Two other people have died of anthrax poisoning. The first, Robert Stevens, an editor at a Florida tabloid newspaper, succumbed a month ago today.
The fourth death was that of Kathy T. Nguyen, a New York City hospital worker. The source of the anthrax that killed her is still unknown. Ms. Nguyen's funeral was held today.
In New York, a videotape that NBC sent as a courtesy to the office of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was found to be contaminated with small traces of anthrax. Mr. Giuliani said "there's no reason to be concerned" about traces of anthrax found on a package containing a videotape from the office of the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. The tape contained footage of a White House briefing Sept. 18 in which a Giuliani aide was mentioned.
A tainted letter was mailed to Mr. Brokaw's office several weeks ago, infecting an aide to Mr. Brokaw with skin anthrax. That letter and the one to Mr. Daschle were both postmarked in Trenton, and the handwriting on both appeared to be identical.
"We feel pretty confident that it was cross-contaminated," Sandra Mulling, a city Health Department spokeswoman, said of the tape. "This is not a new contamination."
A New Jersey postal worker at the Trenton mail facility where the Daschle and Brokaw letters were postmarked was due to leave the hospital today, some two weeks after infection from inhalation anthrax was first announced, hospital officials said.
Yet another possible incident of anthrax in the Washington area was discovered in the mail room of the Washington Veterans Affairs Medical Center, officials said today. An agency spokesman, Phil Budahn, said five mailroom employees have been on antibiotics since Oct. 25 as a precaution.
In Rochester, Minn., Dr. Franklin Cockerill III, a Mayo Clinic microbiologist, said scientists had "discovered a new DNA test that identifies anthrax in less than an hour instead of days." If the test works well outside the laboratory, it would permit local authorities to get test results for exposure more quickly.
The announcement of anthrax in the Pentagon, the embodiment of American military might, would have been shocking not so long ago, before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
The Pentagon, which was badly damaged when a hijacked jetliner crashed into it, killing about 190 people, thus becomes the first place to be affected both by the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax outbreaks. But while there has been widespread speculation that the Sept. 11 events and the anthrax contaminations may be linked, there is no proof that they are.
New anthrax vaccine created
The current vaccine has many side effects
Scientists in India have created a new vaccine for anthrax which they say could be less toxic and longer-lasting than the one that is currently available. The alternative, which is now ready for clinical trials, has been developed by a team from the Centre for Biotechnology at Jawaharlal Nehru University led by Dr Rakesh Bhatnagar.
It is made up of harmless mutant forms of three key proteins that together make the toxin which does the damage to humans infected with anthrax..
The team's findings were due to were due to be made public at an international conference of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in December.
However, they have been released early as scientists race to find more effective ways to tackle the bio terrorist threat posed by anthrax.
Human trials
Speaking to the BBC's Hindi service, Dr Bhatnagar said the laboratory testing of the new vaccine had been completed, and it would now be subjected to animal and human trials.
He said the laboratory trials had shown a very high success rate.
Dr Bhatnagar said that if further tests proved successful, the new vaccine could replace the form currently in use, which although effective has many side effects.
These include: muscle and joint pains, headaches, fatigue, chills, fever and nausea.
There is also a small risk of a severe adverse reaction.
Regular booster doses are also needed to maintain protection.
Dr Bhatnagar was motivated to find a vaccine for anthrax following a major epidemic among animals in West Bengal seven years ago.
ASCB president Elain Fuchs said there was an urgent need for new and improved methods of treating and preventing anthrax infections.
Three proteins
She said: "Dr Bhatnagar's research has the potential for contributing to these efforts."
The anthrax toxin, which is responsible for the most dangerous effects of the disease, consists of three proteins: protective antigen, lethal factor and edema factor.
Individually, the proteins are non-toxic, but in combination they can be deadly.
The vital protein is protective antigen which binds to host cells and enables the other two proteins to enter.
A harmless form of protective antigen is the main ingredient of the new vaccine.
However, it also includes trace amounts of the harmless forms of lethal factor and edema factor which boost its effectiveness.
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Monday, November 5, 2001
World Herald Tribune
By Elizabeth A. Fenn. 370 pages. $25. Hill and Wang.
ALL of a sudden the American Revolution is the flavor of the month. In movies, on television and in books - most notably, of course, in David McCullough's astonishingly popular biography of John Adams, and most egregiously in Mel Gibson's movie "The Patriot" - men and women of the 1770s and 1780s are back in the public eye. .
In the hands of Hollywood, if not of the biographers and historians, this all too predictably means that the Revolutionary period is oversimplified and romanticized, if not outright distorted, made almost as pretty as Colonial Williamsburg, "restored" to a condition that surely would come as a surprise to Americans of the late 18th century.
. "Pox Americana" is a useful corrective to all that. A scrupulously detailed account of a smallpox epidemic that swept across North America from 1775 to 1782, killing an absolute minimum of 130,000 people, it reminds us that there was nothing pretty about the Revolution at all.
. Though the ends it achieved were lofty, it was a brutal, bloody conflict on the battlefield, and it was all the more so because there was a third party to the war: Variola, commonly known as smallpox, the virulently contagious disease that caused suffering, disfigurement, terror and death wherever it went.
. A central argument advanced by Elizabeth A. Fenn, who teaches history at George Washington University, is that wartime was an ideal spawning ground for smallpox, because "political turmoil and military upheaval enhanced the circulation of microbes."
. Men and women "were traveling as never before, meeting, dispersing, and regrouping, silently exchanging pathogens at every turn." Vaccination would not be developed until 1796, when Edward Jenner successfully immunized an 8-year-old boy.
. Inoculation was available, but it was risky and expensive, and it didn't always take. Persons thus exposed to the disease who survived it were immunized for life, but large numbers of Americans - especially black slaves and Indians - lived in communities that had never been exposed to smallpox and thus were far more vulnerable to it than Europeans and the British. Fenn writes: .
"Any army containing large numbers of native-born Americans might be easily brought down by smallpox. … In a tumultuous time characterized by a mobile and susceptible populace, Variola was very likely to find its way into any large group of people gathered in one place. For the British, this was not a major concern beyond the native-born loyalists (including blacks and Indians) who joined their ranks. But for General Washington and the Continental Army, it was a significant obstacle with dire military implications." .
For Washington and his command staff, smallpox presented "a thorny dilemma." The disease could decimate the army if not resisted, but inoculation "would take months, and if just one inoculee was released too early - if the virus escaped quarantine - a full-blown epidemic could result." .
Finally, in the winter of 1777, Washington decided that "the small pox has made such Head in every Quarter" that he had no choice but "to inoculate all the Troops." This, Fenn quite persuasively argues, had a decisive effect in the Southern theater. Continental troops there were mostly native-born and thus highly vulnerable, but "the high level of immunity that had resulted from inoculation" permitted them to fight at full strength. "Washington's unheralded and little-recognized resolution to inoculate the Continental forces," she writes, "must surely rank among his most important decisions of the war."
. The epidemic did not end when the war did. Instead it spread west, south and north, into what was then called Alta California, the Pacific Northwest, Mexico and Canada. It followed the trade routes, Fenn writes, and had especially devastating effect on Indian tribes, which were utterly defenseless against it. Here she describes its legacy among the Indians of the Northwest:
. "Were records of Native American life more complete, they might well show significant cultural voids, the loss of generations of unrecoverable knowledge. They would show other changes as well: households combined, kinship alliances annihilated, religious convictions altered or abandoned. As smallpox squeezed the life from thousands of victims, it extinguished the accumulated wisdom of generations, leaving those who survived without the familiar markers by which they organized their worlds and leaving the generations that followed with a mere shell of their former heritage."
. As all of this should make clear, "Pox Americana" is far more than a footnote to history. It is clear, telling evidence that there is far more to history than political struggles and military strategies.
. We commonly assume that the Americans' enemies in the Revolution were the British and the Hessians who fought in their employ, which is what the textbooks have taught us for generations, but "Pox Americana" shows us that the struggle was far more complicated, and dangerous, and painful.
. It also shows us that smallpox is, to the modern mind, an almost unimaginably painful, destructive disease, leaving us - in present circumstances - to pray that it is not deliberately deployed as a weapon of hatred.
About the smallpox scare, I read that the Indians failed to try this "bio-terrorist" attack during the French and Indian War by spreading it to the blankets. Whatever the case, the talk of smallpox should also include how we have a TB strain, and other illnesses prior to 9-11 that cannot be eradicated through conventional therapies.
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