anthrax (Page 4)

Pierre Thomas writes for abcnews.com that starting in June, the government will begin a wide-ranging program of polygraph testing to determine if one of its own employees is responsible for last year’s anthrax attacks. 200 current and former employees at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and a number of other labs across the country will take voluntary polygraph tests in the hope that one of them might produce a lead. Those questioned will include people who have expertise in the production of anthrax or have had access to it.
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Eleven microbiologists have mysteriously died over the span of five months. Some of them were world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others were the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of biological weapons. Still others were experts in bioterrorism.

The first three died in the space of just over a week in November. Benito Que, 52, was an expert in infectious diseases and cellular biology at the Miami Medical School. Police originally suspected that he had been beaten on November 12 in a carjacking in the medical school’s parking lot, although his body showed no signs of this. Doctors then began to suspect a stroke.
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The DNA sequence of the anthrax sent through the U.S. mail in 2001 has been revealed and confirms suspicions that the bacteria originally came from a U.S. military laboratory.The data released uses codenames for the reference strains against which the attack strain was compared.But it can be revealed that the two strains that are identical to the attack strain most likely originated at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute (USAMRIID) for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The research also shows that substantial genetic differences can emerge in two samples of an anthrax culture separated for only three years. This means the attacker’s anthrax was not separated from the other anthrax at USAMRIID for long and was therefore acquired relatively recently.read more

Lena H. Sun reports in the Washington Post that six months after inhaling anthrax spores, several of the mail workers who survived the deadly disease have yet to make a full recovery and are experiencing serious fatigue and memory loss.

In interviews with five of the six survivors of inhalational anthrax, four reported frequent exhaustion. Only one person, a 74-year-old Florida man, has returned to work. But others say they need daily naps after the slightest exertion.

“The question is, why aren’t these people back to normal?” says Mark Galbraith, an infectious disease specialist in Virginia who is treating one of the victims. This shows how little is known by the medical community about this illness.
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