Article

The truth about anthrax

By keeping ourselves informed we can combat the terrorists and prevent them from creating the anarchy they would so revel in.
Jospeh Lopez -

When talk of “bio-terrorism” first began, not many people took it very seriously, least of all here at Binghamton.

“This is ridiculous” I remember one student commenting in the student Union. He was watching a demonstration on the six o’clock news of how to properly place a gas mask over your face. The next day a professor jokingly commented about how on a whim she had begun researching different types of gas masks and couldn’t decide between the two most popular versions: the Israeli and the Russian.

That was approximately three weeks ago. Since then, things have changed considerably. Most students were too far removed from the Florida incidents to pay much mind. When the NBC New York cases began, students began to take the situation a bit more seriously. But I can’t remember anyone panicking until I read the headline of a recent pipedream article.

Does that say ‘Anthrax Scares Hit Binghamton’?” I asked a student in front of me in the CIW dining hall.

“Yeah,” he answered. A girl in front of him looked panic-stricken as she overheard our conversation. Her face turned white.

“Oh my God, we’re all going to die.”

But is the panic justified? Associating anthrax with a word as tyrannical as “bio-terrorism” can spark fear in many reasonable people, and the goal of most terrorists is to create chaos and disorder.

As far as the anthrax situation is concerned, the terrorists (whoever they may be) have been successful, and the media has done a poor job of quelling the public’s fears.

I’ve heard people ask “what is anthrax?” plenty of times since the scare first began, and many times the answers I hear are ludicrous. In one instance, someone referred to Anthrax as “airborne AIDS.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. To begin with, AIDS is an incurable, highly contagious, and often fatal disease. Anthrax is a curable disease treatable by antibiotics as simple as Penicillin, is not contagious from person to person, and is rarely fatal.

Anthrax is caused by a spore-forming bacterium and comes in three forms: cutaneous, a skin infection caused by contact with a cut or abrasion; inhalation,caused by directly breathing in the spores; and intestinal, caused by eating food contaminated with anthrax.

Of the three only the rarest occurrence, inhalation, is generally fatal, and is the type that was found in the Florida man who died. All other recent cases but two have been cutaneous, and cutaneous anthrax is rarely fatal if treated immediately.

Cutaneous anthrax is distinguishable as a red mark resembling a bug bite which later turns into a black ulcer.

And if you listen to the news, you undoubtedly have heard of many accounts of anthrax exposure, however this does not necessarily mean contamination. So of all 40 or so cases that have been in the news, only a handful actually led to anthrax contamination, and two-thirds of those will almost certainly be cured. To put things into perspective, that’s less than 15 people out of a country of 280 million.

In the future, when we hear the word “anthrax” we should not panic. It can be a fatal disease but it can also be cured, and we should be aware of this.

By keeping ourselves informed we can combat the terrorists and prevent them from creating the anarchy they would so revel in. We do not know yet who is sending the anthrax letters: it’s possible that they are being sent by people assocaited with the Al-Qaida network and the September 11 hijacking, or it could be an American militant gone mad—a new era Tim McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski locked in a cabin in the woods with chemical formulas sprawled across his desk. But in the end it doesn’t really matter who the culprits are - what matters most is that we do not allow fear to overtake us.