Posted on 04/30/2003 2:26:21 PM PDT by FairOpinion
An Egyptian sailor who died in Brazil of a suspected case of anthrax aboard a merchant ship now quarantined outside Halifax Harbour was carrying a bag to a friend in Canada, say Brazilian police.
They alerted Interpol about the potentially contaminated package Ibrahim Sayed Soliman Ibrahim was carrying on the Wadi Alarab, said Neder Duarte, federal police chief of the city of Belem in Brazil’s northern state of Para.
“Maybe he had opened the luggage and then had problems with anthrax,” Duarte told The Daily News yesterday.
Brazilian police are investigating the case to determine if Ibrahim was somehow involved with bioterrorism, Duarte said.
“We cannot affirm really that link of terrorism,” he said. “But we have to investigate that possibility.”
Brazilian police don’t know who Ibrahim was supposed to deliver the package to, or where it was going in Canada, Duarte said.
“The bag didn’t come out from the the ship, just the corpse came out from the ship,” he said. “The bag is in Canada because the bag went with the ship.”
Mounties, however, say they are not probing the case.
“We have not been asked to conduct any sort of criminal investigation or terrorist investigation at all,” said RCMP Sgt. Wayne Noonan.
“We are still saying that Health Canada (is) our lead agency.”
Mounties have not found the bag Brazilian police indicated Ibrahim was carrying before he died.
“We have no information about any suitcase containing any foreign or biological material,” Noonan said.
“And we haven’t been asked to do any investigation by Interpol or by the Brazilian authorities.”
Ibrahim — who was second-in-command on the Wadi Alarab — died about 11 days ago of septicimia, which occurs when toxins from the bacteria enter the blood stream and do damage to the organs. There was strong hemorrhaging of the lungs, pancreas and brain, a symptom consistent with anthrax poisoning.
He had travelled recently to Brazil from Cairo to join his ship, which loaded bauxite in the Amazon to take to an Alcan aluminum plant in Quebec.
Police didn’t discover he may have died from anthrax until the 225-metre-long ship had left Brazilian waters, Duarte said.
Health Canada experts visited the Wadi Alarab on Saturday to take samples from the quarantined ship. They expect results from those tests by Thursday morning, said department spokeswoman Tracy Taweel.
Brazilian authorities are almost certain anthrax killed Ibrahim. But Duarte said final test results in his country should also be available later this week.
“It’s a case of public health, so we have to know the real situation,” Francisco Adriano, another federal police agent, said in a telephone interview from Brasilia, the capital of the South American country.
"...The delay in the collection of the members of the victim, according to Manoel Soares, can have intervened with the result of the finding. According to it, the fragmentos of vísceras, when analyzed for the IEC already they showed one high state of destruction of the fabric and, therefore, more susceptible to present bacterial colonies, what of fact it occurred "fabrics present bacterial colonies in relation to which cannot be moved away the possibility to be related with badly state of conservation of the collected material", wrote Manoel Soares in the finding technician. ..."
I'm wondering - if it is antraz, could the flesh samples tested in Belem be the cause of the confusion? That is, they've decomposed, that could effect the germs too? The first tests in Rio Trombetas - were they flesh? Something else too? They would be fresher in the flesh.
I recall that the tests in America after 9/11 were often of the spores attached to the spreading medium - taken from walls, computer key boards, swabs from nasal passages - free of the effects of flesh decomposition.
Bacillus anthracis seems to be the only obligate bacillus that is poisonous to vertebrates. Bacillus. But the article makes it sound as if it would be easy to bioengineer new obligate bacilli. Who knows whether a new such bacillus might not be at least as poisonous as bacillus anthracis?
Bacillus cereus can cause food poisoning and sometimes more serious disease in people with damaged immune systems, but is not considered a major threat. B. thuringiensis kills insects and is widely used as an environmentally friendly pesticide. But just a few changes could turn them into something as deadly as anthrax, the work suggests.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.