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To: MindBender26
Folks, there is something strange going on here.

Despite the panic, there is still only one confirmed case of anthrax. That has not changed since last week. This is not consistent, at least in my mind, with the sort of mass murder that terrorists enjoy. Furthermore, anthrax is relatively non-contagious, which means its usefulness as a bioweapon is somewhat limited compared to say, smallpox.

On the other hand, the keyboard contamination and the spores detected in the nasal passage of the second (but still healthy) individual, indicate that this is not a sporadic case. Rather, it seems mischievous but targeted to a specific site or individual(s).

All of the above, combined with the outbreak of home-grown, nut-job instigated incidents since 9/11, incline me to believe that this may be a domestic source.

63 posted on 10/09/2001 9:51:44 AM PDT by marshmallow
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To: marshmallow
I'm with you, Marshmallow. In our population are nutcases who think it's fun to call in a bomb threat to a high school. These people are going to take advantage of this. We're going to see bags of powdered sugar flung about on train platforms by these same kinds of people--it's a way to get attention. Sad.

There are certain precautions level-headed individuals should be taking, but believing in unlinked threads that have NO authoritative source isn't one of them. I am currently enrolled in intro biochemistry and we're studying how DNA is artificially replicated in order to get sufficient quantities to sequence. These methods take a lot of time as the DNA must be incubated with the proper enzymes and marked nucleic acids in order to sequence them. The methods of isolating, sequencing and even recombining DNA are time-consuming (although surprisingly cheap--my prof told us that we can buy a ten-year supply of Phosphorus-32 to mark phosphodiesters on the desired nucleic acid for about twenty bucks! maybe he exaggerated?)

Basically, though, I don't believe that the FBI has any shortcuts when it comes to DNA analysis and you cannot examine the DNA of a deadly anthrax spore as cheaply as you can common E coli, either--you have to protect the techs, I'm sure. It takes time to get answers on this stuff, and I don't believe they've had enough time to conclude anything about the strains of anthrax that may be involved.

In short, I do not believe the story that is at the head of this thread, though I don't blame anyone for having posted it. I'm not a PhD candidate, just a very distracted undergrad, but I'm pretty widely read in other fields and I also know how real labwork goes because I've done it. Organic chemistry is especially messy and there are many sources of lab error, such as reactions that do not go to completion, measurement error, and equipment failure.

Panic over this and other anthrax threads is NOT justified. A little normal caution over suspicious packages and bathroom/public hygience IS.
67 posted on 10/09/2001 10:54:00 AM PDT by ChemistCat
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To: marshmallow
An excellent point. Remember, this is one of those fields where the press simply cannot put a story out that does not contain at least one major error; you can't really simplify this stuff.

First, when the FBI said it wasn't a "naturally occurring strain" they probably meant that there was evidence that some sort of genetic manipulation had been done, indicating that it had, at some point, been in a laboratory. Whose, and where, is difficult to tell.

Second, there is a "natural" method of catching the disease if you happen to inhale the spores - this is "woolsorters' disease" and happens once in a very long time, say a decade or so. Twice in a week, and in the same location, is simply not believable as a coincidence. It is, of course, feasible that the patient could have sneezed the spores onto his keyboard, somewhat less feasible but still possible that his coworker could have picked it up that way as well. But the disease doesn't usually produce more spores inside the body, so it is more likely that they both picked it up from a common source.

It should be pointed out that we're not going to get an epidemic of anthrax out of this - the disease isn't particularly communicable in its pulmonary form. This is more like a poison...the problem is that the spores are durn near immortal and detoxification of an area they're released in is a very expensive process.

Smallpox is the other end of the spectrum - very communicable person-to-person, but not particularly communicable otherwise - the "infected blanket" stories that have been all over the 'net in the last week are pretty much just that, stories - one documented attempt was made to inflict the disease this way but it isn't too likely to have succeeded. Person-to-person, though, smallpox spreads like wildfire, and that could cause an epidemic, but won't poison an area as antrax spores would.

It isn't that difficult for an individual lab to produce augmented anthrax spores in small amounts - it is a "facultative anaerobe," meaning that only a tiny amount of oxygen in an otherwise oxygenless environment is necessary to induce sporulation in the bacterium. Ramping this up to industrial amounts is NOT easy, thankfully, due to the highly specific environmental conditions. Nearly any university-level lab could do the former; mostly only those at the national-asset level could do the latter. Hussein's people certainly could.

69 posted on 10/09/2001 11:12:18 AM PDT by Billthedrill
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