KAM_Indianapolis
New member
Got this today from Hackworths newsletter, looks like a lot of good info.
Friends & Readers: this article was written by Meryl Nass, MD:
A physician in private practice in Freeport, Maine, Meryl Nass has worked in the field of anthrax and bioterrorism for the past thirteen years. She was the first person to investigate an anthrax epidemic (in Rhodesia during its civil war) and prove that it was due to biowarfare. She has written and spoken widely on investigating epidemics, ways of preventing bioterrorism and, for the past 4 years, has been very active in bringing problems associated with human anthrax vaccine to the public's attention. She has testified before two Congressional committees and two committees of the National Academy of Sciences. She has been seen in the past month fielding anthrax questions on Tom Brokaw, CNN, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and FOX News.
>> October 21 Update - Current Anthrax Situation
More envelopes are being discovered with anthrax spores.
Government spokespersons equivocate on whether the materials are "weapons grade."
Better detection of anthrax spores appears to be taking place, but slowly.
Congressional office buildings have been shut down for decontamination, but the methods for doing so have not been discussed.
Some other buildings that have received anthrax-containing letters remain open.
A case of inhalation anthrax has been diagnosed in a Washington DC postal worker
Issues that need to be addressed regarding the bioterrorism response include the following:
1. Are the anthrax-containing envelopes an initial tease, or warning? They are a good way to disseminate small quantities, while avoiding identification of the sender. But what may be ahead? Spores in ventilation systems? Spores at sports events or where there are dense population concentrations? Thousands or millions of letters containing anthrax? How will we know in time, and how will we decontaminate ventilation systems, electronics, sports arenas, soil, etc.?
2. At the present time, public health authorities have continued to use (primarily cutaneous) human anthrax cases as the harbingers of anthrax dissemination. Cutaneous infections require many fewer spores to induce illness, compared to inhalation anthrax. The infected individuals are serving as the "canaries in the mineshaft" who warn that anthrax is present. If the extent of spore dissemination increases (higher concentrations in ambient air from envelopes, or through other means) then the inhalation cases will serve as the canaries, and there will be many fatalities.
3. I will continue to harp on the need for accurate and rapid sampling of the environment as the most important (by far) technology needed to deal with the offensive use of anthrax. There are likely to be many more envelopes that have already dispersed anthrax spores, but have not been identified yet, because there have (so far) been no cases of illness related to those envelopes, and spores were not seen by the person(s) handling the mail. This means that anthrax spores may be contaminating a number of environments in which they have not been detected. We may not see cases until small animals, children, or people with immune system impairment become exposed in those environments.
4. Only by identifying an environment contaminated with anthrax before illness appears are we likely to effectively treat inhalation cases.
5. Only by identifying these environments can we remove people from the environment and protect them from further exposure.
6. It is possible that we will not be able to do a complete clean up of contaminated environments, for the time being. There has not been a great deal of research into how to clean up homes and offices, for example. Gruinard Island, off the coast of Scotland, was decontaminated 45 years after it was used as a test area for anthrax during World War II. During those 45 years, humans and animals were barred from the island. Ten acres were decontaminated: this required defoliating the area, using 200 tons of 37% formaldehyde, diluted in seawater, that was sprayed over the area, and then additional formaldehyde was re-sprayed after deep soil sampling revealed persistent organisms.
7. What else works to kill anthrax spores, which can remain viable for decades or hundreds or years? Bleach, which must be in contact with spores for at least 2 minutes. Paraformaldehyde gas, glutaraldehyde, hydrogen peroxide and peracetic acid also work, and need to be in contact with spores for at least as long. But these materials can be corrosive and are not appropriate for homes and offices, though they can be used to decontaminate most laboratories. Spores can be boiled; the standard recommendation has been to keep the water at a rolling boil at least 10 minutes to kill spores of any pathogen. Steam also kills spores in from 1 to 10 minutes. In goat hair mills, the goat hair was treated at 170 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes, but many spores retained their viability after this treatment. Moist heat works much better than dry heat. Fumigation can be performed with ethylene or propylene oxides, or paraformaldehyde gas.
8. I hope you can tell from this that I do not know a completely safe and effective way to perform decontamination. This needs to be an area of intensive investigation now. Dr. Alibek has suggested that methods used for decontamination in Sverdlovsk in 1979 (washing trees and houses, and paving dirt roads), may have re-aerosolized anthrax spores, and that this may have increased the number of cases of inhalation anthrax.
9. Dr. Ken Alibek suggested steam ironing letters before opening, which sounds like a good idea. Put a cloth between the iron and the letter. We need to know more about the temperature setting and how long the iron needs to be in contact with the letter.
10. The bottom line is that spores are odorless, tasteless, and invisible, individually. In a worst case scenario, up to one trillion spores (1,000,000,000,000) might be present in one gram of material. One gram can be contained easily within a one-ounce (28 gram) letter. It theoretically could contain a million lethal doses, if the majority of the spores were viable, of the right size, and dispersed easily without clumping.
11. What is a lethal dose of spores? The reason why you may read a variety of different estimates for this number is because a) there are no human-derived data, and b) there are a variety of factors that impact the answer. There are many animal experiments, and those results are surprising at times. It also depends on the virulence of the anthrax strain used, the amount of air you inhale (during exercise, you breathe in several times as much air as you do at rest), the % of viable spores, the distribution of size of spores, whether the spores easily separate from each other, and your own inherent immune system function. Thus the number might range from 10,000 spores to many millions. Animal tests of a sample from a letter should give us a rough idea of how virulent the potion is, and what a lethal dose might be.
12. Here are some animal data for lethal doses (LD50) of anthrax spores by subcutaneous injection and inhalation (from JM Barnes). This shows why there are so many cutaneous cases, compared to inhalation cases.
Species # spores injected # spores inhaled
Rabbit 100-1000 600,000
Guinea
Pig 100-1000 370,000
Mouse 10-100 1,400,000
13. Another experiment in pigs: each of 50 pigs was fed from 10 million to 10 billion Ames strain spores (C Redmond et al.) Only 2 of the pigs died (4% of the total) and two others had anthrax isolated from blood, but survived. By 21 days after feeding the spores, the majority of pigs had developed antibodies to anthrax, indicating that they became infected and recovered. Humans, like pigs, are probably relatively resistant to anthrax, compared to many other species.