Posted on 10/30/2001 9:45:15 AM PST by HopieAnn
I heard on the local news here in Santa Clara County that a remote area has a bunch of cattle dying of anthrax. And the handlers are receiving Cipro. How common is this?
So9
There have been regular and periodic outbreaks over the years.
By SCOTT KILMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
UVALDE, Texas -- All that remains of the 2,800-pound bull are bleached bones beneath a mesquite tree. Scrounging for plants in the rocky soil here a dozen years ago, it uprooted an ancient plague that killed it and thousands of dollars worth of other livestock.
"We're probably standing on a lot of anthrax spores right now," says rancher Carl Hellums as he kicks the ground that gave rise to the 1989 anthrax outbreak.
Uvalde, a town of 15,000 on the edge of the Chihuahuan desert, is one corner of what scientists call the anthrax triangle. It's made up of a handful of southwest Texas counties with the most anthrax-rich soil in the nation.
When conditions get dry enough here, animals dig deep into the soil for roots, their mouths brushing the ground and picking up dirt laced with anthrax, an organism that biblical scholars believe tormented the pharaoh's livestock in the book of Exodus. The visitors' center in Uvalde offers a brochure called "Asking about Anthrax," and anybody can buy a $4 vial of an anthrax vaccine for cattle in the town's farm-supply stores.
This community's familiarity with naturally occurring anthrax helps explain why it isn't experiencing the panic that has gripped the rest of the nation. If the mail here were suddenly contaminated with the highly fatal pulmonary version of anthrax, people here might be just as confused and panicked as people elsewhere. But the folks here have had deep experience with the highly treatable skin version.
"To people here, anthrax is just business as usual," says Cecil "Salty" Arnim, a large-animal veterinarian who has practiced here for 39 years. "I bet you a dollar that if I had a nasal swab we'd find anthrax spores, but here I am." This past summer, Uvalde had the worst local outbreak of skin anthrax since 1989, but it's highly unlikely that this place was the source of the anthrax recently sent in letters to media outlets and government offices. To isolate a culture from here and manufacture large amounts of it would be technically possible but a great deal more work than obtaining the stuff from a laboratory.
There is also little risk of an infected steer winding up in the general food supply. When cattle get anthrax, death occurs so quickly that they rarely make it to a meatpacking plant. Ranchers burn the bloated corpses to kill the anthrax spores.
That doesn't mean ranchers and other rural folk don't contract the disease. A cowboy on a stricken ranch this summer was hospitalized after skinning a buffalo. According to the Texas Department of Health, he was treated with antibiotics for nine days and released with a five-inch-long black scab on one arm, the signature of anthrax contracted through a cut. And last year, a Minnesota farm family was treated with the Bayer AG antibiotic ciprofloxacin after eating hamburgers from one of their cows that later tested positive for anthrax.
But compared with other rural problems -- drought, rabies and such -- anthrax is tame. Russell Brown, a rancher whose son lost several horses to anthrax over the summer, says, "What worries me more than anything are the rattlesnakes."
In Uvalde, nearly everyone can recognize the first sign of anthrax: the swollen corpses of cattle and deer. And nearly everyone knows how to react: Vaccinate the herds and don gloves. "It's just no big deal because people here use common horse sense," says John Shudde, a family practitioner who raises 300 ewes on his ranch.
Surgeon Harry Watkins says that during his career here he has diagnosed only two people with anthrax. Both got it through the blood of infected animals they were slaughtering. A round of antiobiotics, he says, and they were fine.
Yet bacillus anthracis can have a big impact on the local economy. While vaccine protected most of the county's cattle during the anthrax outbreak this summer, many deer were wiped out, threatening to put a dent into a fall hunting business that normally generates millions of dollars for motels, restaurants and stores.
Also, because livestock vaccinations don't take effect for days, each outbreak can kill dozens of cattle before ranchers can fight back. Now 68 years old, Mr. Hellums figures he has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to anthrax.
His worst anthrax experience came in 1989, when he found a horse lying in the road, bleeding from the nose and horribly bloated. The day before, it had been so healthy that a ranch hand had ridden it.
By the time that outbreak was over, Mr. Hellums had lost five horses, eight bulls and 20 cows. Protected only by his leather work gloves, he burned the animals with diesel fuel where they dropped to destroy the spores inside them.
This past June, Mr. Hellums was the first person to sound the alarm here. He found a deer lying dead beside a water trough on one of the ranches he rents. Animals in the grip of anthrax seek water to ease the fever, so he threw the deer carcass in the back of a truck and drove to Dr. Arnim, the local veterinarian, who tested the animal's spleen. The lab results came back positive for anthrax.
This time, Mr. Hellums was able to save a lot of cattle. His own livestock were safe because he had vaccinated them, and neighboring ranchers had enough time to treat many of their animals before the disease leaped from the deer population.
But rest assured - there are several HUGE steps between finding it in the dirt and using it to infect somebody. (although you could get cutaneous anthrax from a few spores)
Why don;t they run an anthrax exposure test on a random sample of people from, say, South Africa or Sweden. They might be surprised to find out how many people might have been exposed to it through contact with animals, developed an immunity after a low-grade infection, and never picked it up from a terrorist.
Anything you hear would be a great help ...
Mrs Kus
BY JULIE SEVRENS LYONS AND GLENNDA CHUI
Knight Ridder Newspapers
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Nearly two dozen Santa Clara County (Calif.) cattle have died of anthrax in the past week, an outbreak that health officials are calling a serious -- but not alarming -- case of the livestock disease.
Officials stressed that there is no risk to the general public, although four ranchers who came into direct contact with the infected animals were given antibiotics as a preventive measure. The disease is not contagious, even among the cattle, and there is no indication this is in any way linked to the anthrax scare on the East Coast or the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
``We have no reason to believe at this point that this is anything other than a natural exposure'' to anthrax, said Greg Van Wassenhove, Santa Clara County's agricultural commissioner.
County, state and federal agriculture officials, along with the FBI, have all been investigating what is one of the worst anthrax episodes among California livestock in a decade. Twenty-one cows and bulls have died. The sick animals all belonged to the same herd on one ranch, county health officials said. They would not specify the ranch's name or location, saying the information is confidential.
A veterinarian had been called in after the cattle began dying last week, and laboratory tests confirmed they had fallen victim to anthrax, bacteria commonly found in soil.
The cattle were exposed to anthrax spores through ``eating dirt, primarily,'' Van Wassenhove said. At this time of year, when the pastures are brown and parched, ``The stubble is so short out there that cattle are ingesting soil,'' he said.
The only people potentially exposed to the bacteria were those present when the dead cattle were cut open during necropsy, the animal equivalent of a human autopsy. The ranch hands had not been wearing gloves during the procedure, so they were given a 10-day supply of the antibiotic Cipro just in case, said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, the county's health officer.
Health officials had been concerned that anthrax in the animals' blood could have entered someone's body through a small scratch on the hands, causing cutaneous, or skin, anthrax. But there is no evidence the workers had been infected.
The outbreak is confined to a ranch in the southeastern foothills of the county, and the remaining 120 cattle have all been vaccinated to protect them should they also come in contact with the hardy bacteria, Fenstersheib said.
Given the spate of anthrax cases in humans in recent weeks, the FBI had been called in just as a precaution, said Dr. Richard Breitmeyer, the state's veterinarian and director of Animal Health and Food Safety Services. Local investigators shared the anthrax strain with FBI scientists for typing, to help rule out any possible link to terrorism.
But anthrax has long been found in the state's soil and has periodically caused illness in livestock, Fenstersheib said.
Indeed, since 1926, California has seen 34 anthrax outbreaks in its livestock, including some in Santa Clara County. In one of the worst cases, 43 cattle and 135 sheep died from the disease in 1984 in the Carrisa Plains, an area about an hour's drive east of Atascadero in central California.
But cases are still considered somewhat rare. Since 1991, there have been only 10 known outbreaks of anthrax in California livestock, nine of which occurred in cattle.
The cattle that died last week were buried, along with topsoil that likely contained the bacteria, to prevent additional livestock from coming into contact with the anthrax spores. The remaining members of the herd have been quarantined for 60 days.
Agriculture officials plan to hold a public briefing on the outbreak today.
``If this had happened Sept. 10, there would be no press release,'' said Sharon Hietala, an immunologist with the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory in Davis. ``It's just that people are very sensitized to the word `anthrax' now. We wanted to make sure people were aware that this is something we're not hiding.''
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Mrs Kus
And the 10th?
I hate vague statements like this. This is exactly the sort of nonsense I'm dealing with right now.
I would just ONCE love a straight answer.
Mrs Kus
Because this bacterium produces extremely heat and chemical resisitent spores, once animal cases occur the grounds in which the animals grazed remains a potential source for infection of other animals for decades or longer.
Anthrax is a good deal like plague - cases occur irregularly in this country [usually in the western part of the United States] and are a rich source of alarm for some journalists and those who know little, or nothing, about bacteriology.
How common is the Anthrax organism? As common as the human species.
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