The vector is very puzzling indeed. I'm reminded of the first case, which also was puzzling, and had the authorities tracing his travels, and for a time blaming his drinking from a stream in North Carolina. Until the mail system was found to be the vector. I suspect the latest NY case is due to an independent source, and I doubt if it was secondary from a contaminated post office. Whoever did the original mailings would not have used up all of their stock for those three letters. They must either have sent other letters or had a lot left over and, assuming they were immune through vaccination, abx, or whatever, they could easily have dispersed the rest somewhere else. If so, we will find other confusing cases in the next few days, and the pepetrator(s) may still be seeding, which may be what the current warning is about. If so, and if they seed now, we won't find the next wave for another couple of weeks.
One thing that I keep turning over in my mind is the verbage in the letters. In particular, the use of "penacilin" instead of "penicillin." I go back and forth between a foreign operative who is trying to double confound us, or a domestic terrorist who is dumb. The misspelling of penicillin makes me think it is the latter, because a foreigner who didn't know how to spell a technical term in english would surely have turned to a dictionary (unless, as I said, it was to double confound us). And the mode of misspelling, "penacilin" follows the way a native English speaker would pronounce it, with an "a" instead of an "i." The Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming named penicillin from a mold he isolated with the latin name "Penicillium notatum," so any non-native speaker would err on the side of using an "i" ("ee" sound) instead of an "a," which is the way it is commonly pronounced in the vernacular. Well, I'm no expert in language, but these are my thoughts.
On the other hand, the use of lower case capital letters is also unusual. This hints at a foreigner, someone who didn't have time to learn our lower case alphabet. However, it could have also been someone who was tracing the letters from a projector, or from variable size fonts, and this way the writing could not be matched to his previous writing. If so, this would be particularly important if that person had sent previous letters, maybe some hoaxes, that could be matched. |
