Reuters report on the second anthrax case. If accurate, the details are a little disturbing, but no reason for panic -
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - News that a second Florida man has tested positive for exposure to anthrax is worrying, but it will be easy to prevent an outbreak of disease with drugs, medical experts have said.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is treating the case -- in which 63-year-old Robert Stevens died and another person became infected -- as a potential criminal investigation, Attorney General John Ashcroft said.
Medical experts said that is understandable, because there is no easy natural way for anthrax spores to have gotten into the building where Stevens worked.
But anthrax disease is very easy to treat with antibiotics, if people get the drugs before they start to show symptoms.
"It's very hard to find a benign explanation, so it is upsetting," Theresa Koehler, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, said in a telephone interview.
"They found spores in the building. That's very suspect," said Koehler, an expert on anthrax. "It is unheard of that you would find spores in a building like this."
A man who worked with Stevens tested positive for anthrax but was ill with unrelated symptoms, Florida health officials said. They did not release the man's name, but said he was in his 70s.
Bioterrorism specialists have been saying for years that the United States is very susceptible to a biological or chemical weapons attack, and they have named anthrax as a prime agent because it is easily spread and deadly when it takes the form of airborne spores.
Fears of a deliberate release of an agent such as anthrax spores have been heightened since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and the hijacking of an airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania.
State health officials said they found anthrax on the computer keyboard of Stevens, who worked as a photographer at The Sun, a supermarket tabloid in Boca Raton, Florida.
He had pulmonary anthrax, which had not been previously seen in the United States since 1976. Stevens died last Friday after being admitted to a hospital earlier in the week.
The building where the two men worked was closed on Monday and was to be examined by health and law enforcement personnel. Workers and visitors to the building in recent weeks were asked to contact health officials.
"I could understand people panicking," Koehler said. But she said anyone who worked in or near the building was being tested. "Everyone is going to get swabbed nasally to see if they are carrying spores," she said.
Tests had already shown that this particular strain of anthrax was easy to treat, Donald A. Henderson, head of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said in a telephone interview.
"It certainly is not an engineered strain, not a strain like the Russians produced and wrote about -- they said they had produced an antibiotic-resistant strain," Henderson said.
Henderson and Koehler said anyone who had anthrax spores in the nose would be treated with antibiotics.
"People will go on antibiotics -- ciprofloxacin. That is the good news," Koehler said.
"It is not contagious. It's a frightening situation but if you look at it -- if this was a release, it sure didn't work very well."
And, Koehler added, it is conceivable that the two men were exposed months ago.
"We don't know when he (Stevens) was exposed," she said. "When you experience symptoms is related to dose and time of exposure. He could have gotten a very low dose a long time ago. If you get a huge dose you can get symptoms in a couple of days." |
