Anthrax-like contagious disease kill 6 in northern Iraq
BAGHDAD, 31 March — Six Iraqis died last week of a serious skin disease, which workers at the Republican hospital in Mosul, 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, said looks like the anthrax, local newspaper Azzaman reported Monday.
Workers at the hospital confirmed that highly secretive health and security procedures were taken in the burns department in the past three days.
A small girl was brought to the hospital by her father two weeks ago to treat her from what was thought a sun burn on her hand, and was discovered later to be the source of the disease.
The girl is thought to have transferred the disease, which is being kept a secret, to other people and patients in the hospital. The sources said that all workers in the hospital were injected with a vaccine against the anthrax, to prevent any infection whatsoever, which is the same vaccine given to US soldiers for protection of the chemical weapons.
The burns department in the hospital was closed and an extensive and concentrated process of sterilizing was conducted, and the officials at the hospital refrained from discussing the issue or giving any media announcements about the kind of the disease and its source.
MNA/Xinhua
from a pdf document, here's the link THE NEW LIGHT OF MYANMAR
Anthrax is under-discussed, it seems to me.
Pulmonary anthrax is NOT contagious. It is rare since anthrax spores are too large to get into the lungs unless inhaled.
the only way it could "spread" would be if someone had a lot of weaponized anthrax on their clothes(i.e. ground into tiny pieces of antrhax and treated so not to clump)
Brucellosis is common in sheperds and mildly contageous from person to person.
Plague is VERY contagious from person to person, as is SARS. And remember Hanta virus that killed a couple of Navajo students a couple years ago?
If it's anthrax, then the entire hospital would be in jeopardy. But the incubation period is a bit longer than described.
bump
OK, so a shepherd could get anthrax from a sheep. What accounts for the other 5 deaths? It can't spread person-to-person and yet 6 are dead (since MOST of the time it doesn't kill, probably dozens of others sick). What could account for so many catching it simultaneously?
Another waste of time. Story coming from the pajama patrol, leaked to the keystone cops and to the liberal media. Garbage, just like all their other crap.
How long befor DUers and their media lackeys cry that Bush is the cause of this?
The claim should never have appeared in a news article dated May 11, 2004. It was a recycled news story, already known to be false. (And the supposed contagiousness was a giveaway that it was bogus anyway.)
In the interest of putting false rumors to rest, I've pinged everybody who had posted to this thread.