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.