Jill, I have no idea why a 94-year old would get inhalation anthrax. For all we know, some of the elderly dying from pneumonia (very common) have had that kicked off by anthrax or some other spores, and we never bothered to check before. Maybe it's as you say, in this case some spores rubbed off on some other letters, and someone with a weakened immune system, or elderly, would be affected whereas a healthy, young person would not.
However, I think we are getting too concerned with finding the specific cause of this, or that case, hoping to find the person who sent the letters. While I hope we find them and fry them, there is a bigger issue here. We are like someone who got bit by a mosquito at a picnic and is now searching for that mosquito, thinking that if we squash him we are free of mosquitos.
Form a homeland defense perspective, the situation at hand is very dangerous, and not many are willing to confront it and take action. We had two mailings, the first one not as potent, the second much more so. We are very lucky that these mailings affected such few people. But the perpetrators learned a lot. They learned how easy it is to use our mail system to deliver a potent weapon of indiscriminate, potentially mass, destruction. Next time you can bet they won't have separate mailings that allow us to quarantine a bunch of mail and look for infected letters. And you can bet they won't send them to high profile individuals, who don't open their own mails.
Instead of 2, 3, or 4 letters, think what would happen if they send 100, or 1000, letters, all within hours of each other, dropped off in mail boxes, sent to -- your guess is as good as mine -- how about corporate offices around the nation, or stores at shopping malls, or just randomly selected individuals. First, dozens of central processing facilities across the country would be infected, paralyzing our mail distribution system. Second, thousands of people would be infected, and our corporations, our malls, etc, would be shut down for extended periods. And by the time we found out we had been attacked, when the first person notices some funny powder, it will have been too late, because the attack could be timed so that when the first person notices, another 1000 letters would have gone through the system.
This is the threat, not an isolated lady in CT, or NY, although each victim is important.
What are we doing about this threat? Absolutely nothing, that I can see. I don't see anyone calling for rethinking how easy it is for anyone to mail letters at street corner drop boxes, with whatever fake return address they want, with no way of tracing the letter back. I don't hear any talk of fast-reacting bio sensors at every central processing facility. I said once, and I still say, that we need to declare an emergency on our postal system, a vulnerability we didn't realize we had, and redo the way we process mail, or what is really necessary to mail.
But none of this will happen until the disaster comes, just as nothing will happen with our shipping container inspections.
In the meantime, I will just continue to observe with some humor the diligence of our investigators in trying to figure out who infected a 94 year old lady. |
