Posted on 10/22/2001 10:40:41 AM PDT by newsperson999
ok. Before you flame me...lets discuss this..
2 postal workers are dead(and at different locations) 2 more confirmed with inhalation anthrax...maybe 9 more cases..it takes 8,000 or more spores to get sick from anthrax..
Well they didn't open the mail there they just sorted it, yet still somehow all that anthrax must have goten into the air...
The scary thing is this. How many spores got onto mail that went ot the general public?!!!
This may be much bigger then we are lead to believe. Or it may not. Please put your 2 cents in.
I do. Often. At least figuratively, it's hard to hear anyone over the internet.
Every time one more case pops up, there's a flurry of posts laden with capital letters and multiple exclamation points, implying that the new case was the turning point between a limited-results attack and a "we're all gonna catch the disease now!" scenario. Or at least that seems to be the emotion behind it.
Some more cases are inevitably going to pop up, even just from the original letter attack that we all know about now. It doesn't change anything, it's no excuse for a fresh batch of posts saying, "Ok, *NOW* maybe it's time to panic!!!"
It reminds me of the anti-gun crowd, who take every single instance of a shooting anywhere, splatter it loudly across a press release, and fire it off with rhetoric meant to give the impression, "Ok, *THAT's* the last straw, now y'all will listen to us and ban these evil guns!!!!"
I'll consider getting worried if the odds of an average American getting anthrax rises above the one-in-a-million level. I'll get nervous at the one-in-100,000 level. I'll start to panic at the one-in-1,000 level. But not until then.
That's not to say I'm not mad as hell at the perpetrators, and hope we find them and literally skin them alive. But that's a different thing entirely from losing sleep over fear of getting infected.
It isn't silly at all. What we are talking about is the risk of you or anyone else not making it through the day. The risk of me being killed driving 20 miles around Atlanta on onw of the interstates is greater than it is for me catching and dying from an exposure to anthrax. The real value of an anthrax attack to the terrorists is all the media attention and hype. Setting off a couple of bombs would kill more people, but right now they are attacking our psych and our infrastructure. They want to shut down the airlines, restrict travel, and create fear.
Richard W.
I listed medical facts, ace.
For a handful of reasons the medical community has stopped short of recommending the flu vaccine for children. There was a study done by the University of Washington in Seattle that you might want to update yourself with. Maybe look into hospitalization for acute respiratory disease for children under 16 years and tell us how many perish each year. And as far as total number of people who are infected every 12 months in the states with influenza, probably triple the number who die.
We had to drop two to let them know we had more than one. Of course, two is all we had. I wonder, really, what else these guys have up their sleeves.
Not to be callus, but like most of the MEN here, I don't consider an enemy that, so far at least, can't take out more than THREE of us in over a month as a real threat.
Sept. 11th may be their "Fat man" and a small arsenal of anthrax may be their "Little Boy." Time will tell, but I am living my life as though this risk LITERALLY does not exist. And I'm doing everything I can to shame the chicken littles into silence. I refuse to fear them simply because they slipped a small amount of this stuff into a couple of high profile areas and were very inefective at actually infecting anyone.
BTW, flu symptoms and dead in 6 hours? I wouldn't mind meeting the Lord that way.
Experts: Unlikely that post office contamination tainted other mail with anthraxBy LAURAN NEERGAARD
The Associated Press
10/22/01 8:33 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's highly unlikely that any anthrax present in a Washington post office could have contaminated other letters awaiting delivery to people's homes, anthrax specialists said Monday.
"Your mail could not hold onto enough spores in the process of making it from the postal processing area to your home," explained bioterrorism expert Bruce Clements of St. Louis University. "I don't think people need to be concerned about receiving their mail at home."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoed that a risk to people at home is unlikely, noting it takes a high dose of anthrax bacteria to become ill.
"We can't say there's absolutely no risk," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner acknowledged. But, "based on what we know now the risk is probably small. ... Therefore our advice about handling suspected packages would still stand."
Health officials announced Monday that the bacteria somehow circulated through a Washington postal facility, sickening at least two workers with the deadly inhalation form of anthrax and possibly killing two others.
Two men in Florida, one of whom died, have also been diagnosed in the past 2½ weeks with inhalation anthrax, a disease not seen in this country since 1978. Six others, including two postal workers in New Jersey, have been infected with a highly treatable form of anthrax that is contracted through the skin.
The Washington postal facility processed the anthrax-containing letter received by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle last week, but that letter was sealed. Doctors agree a person must inhale at least 8,000 spores deep into the lungs to contract inhalation anthrax.
How the postal workers could have breathed in that much remains a mystery that has bioterrorism experts like Clements puzzled -- as well as the CDC.
"We do not have a theory," said CDC Deputy Director David Fleming. Because only trace amounts of anthrax were found in post offices in New Jersey and Florida, the inhalation risk in Washington "was not something that we expected or even in retrospect could have anticipated," he said.
One possibility is that the postal system cleans its equipment with air hoses. "We blow out dust from our machines," said Postmaster General John E. Potter. "We are revising those procedures as we speak."
But once anthrax spores are in the air, studies have proved they settle to the ground fairly quickly, within hours.
U.S. Army studies cited in the Journal of the American Medical Association show once that settling occurs, it is very difficult for enough spores to be blown back into the air to sicken anyone, noted Dr. Luciana Borio of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Civilian Biodefense.
One such study found no significant health risk even if 1 million anthrax spores were deposited into 11 square feet and dust-blowing helicopters landed nearby.
If someone receives a letter containing anthrax-laced powder, "it is possible for a spore to escape an envelope," Surgeon General David Satcher said Monday, noting that the spores are microscopic. "We've had people infected without the envelope being opened."
But there have to be enough spores in that one spot for that to happen.
"I would not personally be worried about handling my mail," Borio stressed.
However, she noted that since bioterrorism-through-mail hasn't happened before, it can't be said with certainty that there's no risk. "Hopefully over the next week or so, nobody gets sick" outside of the post office and "that will be the best evidence," she said.
If you get a suspicious letter at home, put it down, wash your hands with hot water and soap and call the police, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson advised.
The U.S. Postal Service on Monday began mailing all households a postcard saying what should make you suspicious about a piece of mail and what to do with it.
I don't know how long the age group has even been receiving the vaccine, it used to be 55 years. These people are not simply high risk in light diabetes, immunosuppression, severe forms of anemia and chronic diseases of the heart, lung or kidneys, asthma......., the are contagious!
Childrens epidemics ended in the early nineties, but they too were not simply vunerable to themselves yet extremely contagious. Check the deat ratios back then per 100 hospitals and read about the spread of the infection. And consider what it does to our society when we knock off the bottom 3-5% in terms of the future of this country, not to mention the families themselves. Read what I told you the first time instead of continuing to argue.
Anthrax doesn't pose a similar threat!
I vote this the scariest reply on this thread. The thought of blowing accumulated dust out of a machine in a crowed mail room - I'm surprised everyone in that room doesn't have anthrax.
The accidental Soviet release in the late 70's showed onset of symptoms as much as 43 days after the (known) day of exposure.
God help those poor devils, there may yet be many cases originating at that facility.
When you got out to your mail box, grab your mail and turn your one shoulder blade to the wind. Then sort through your mail. Any unrecognized mail sit it down outside of the house. Examine it more carefully, open it outside of the house with your shoulderblade to the wind. This will allow any anthrax spores to blow away from you.
What we are talking about here is something the size of one to 5 microns. This is the size of a dust particle, the little tiny one that seem to float in the sunlight inside your house. It takes them 5 minutes to finally settle on the furniture. A 1/2 mph wind will blow these across the street in 10 seconds. A hair is 25 microns wide. Do you understand how small one micron is?.
Well, since worrying is an act that consumes energy while solving nothing, I certainly wouldn't waste my time on that. I don't know what to tell you. Are you going about your business, living your life? Or are you obsessing on the situation, fixated on the remote possibility that you may be among the .0001% of the population of DC that will be infected?
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