P.S. I'm still confused about why a domestic terrorist would have attacked American Media in Florida. And think there is some disconnect there.
Finally, does anybody know what happened to the guys in New Jersey that were arrested and their apartment searched?
"Witnesses said the arrest followed a three-hour search by FBI and immigration agents of an apartment where four "Middle Eastern" men were living.
The arrested man, identified by his brother Ilyas Chaudry as Allah Rakha, was understood to have been detained by US immigration authorities. FBI agents seized several bags of potential evidence from the flat."
Experts doubt lots of inhalation anthrax has gone unnoticed in past
The Associated Press
Before the spate of anthrax-by-mail cases began, inhalation anthrax was reported to be extremely rare in the United States. But the case of an elderly Connecticut woman is the second within a month without any apparent connection to the mail.
Could it be that inhalation anthrax was more common than everybody thought, and only appeared to be so rare because doctors were overlooking cases before anthrax hit the news?
Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, called that unlikely at a briefing Wednesday. And in telephone interviews, bioterrorism experts agreed.
"The odd case, perhaps, could escape notice," said Dr. Greg Poland, an anthrax expert at the Mayo Clinic. "But any appreciable number, I couldn't believe it."
Before a Florida man was found to have inhalation anthrax last month, because of a tainted letter, only 18 cases of the disease had been reported in the past century in the United States. None had been reported since 1976. People have generally been infected through exposure to contaminated animal hides or hair.
Relatively few people would ever be exposed to a dangerous dose of anthrax spores in the first place, experts said. What is more, they said, a case of inhalation anthrax is dramatic and leaves its signature in chest X-rays and CT scans, in the bloody fluid that a needle withdraws from around the lungs, and in studies of the patient's blood.
In blood tests, a result positive for anthrax "would be like slapping you in the face with a hot poker. You don't have to look for it," said Dr. Craig Smith of the Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, Ga.
The rapid decline of a person who dies a pneumonia-type death would ordinarily lead to an autopsy, Poland said. In that examination, inhalation anthrax "would be pretty hard to miss," he said.
Hmmm?
I also suspect that rural people with an overwhelming pneumonia might not get identified if they had anthrax. I remember early in the HIV crisis, that we were told that probably some of the young men dying of "viral pneumonia" were probably suffering from this disease (this is before the blood test) and had PCP pneumonia. At that time, PCP pneumonia was usually only seen in cancer pateints and in vietnam orphans. I remember my only case was a lymphoma patient with "viral pneumonia". We couldn't do the culture, so treated him and he got better.
Ditto for anthrax