Say, here's something. Years ago I read a cheesy murder mystery, where the killer left no clues, but he was eventually found when the cops realized his murders all lined up in a straight line, so they cased out the next point in the sequence and caught him. Now, if you line up the Capitol, the Princeton/Trenton area, Manhattan, and now Oxford, CT, on a map they are pretty much in a straight line. Mmm...
Jeez, Rocketman! Sounds like the FBI should have hired you to solve this...
Wind may explain mystery anthrax cases
newscientist.com
18:10 14 December 01
Debora MacKenzie
The two "mystery" cases of anthrax in the US may have been caused by spores blown on the wind from Trenton, New Jersey where anthrax-laced letters were processed in October. If true, the fear that anthrax was carried widely across North America by contaminated mail may be unfounded.
Two of the five US anthrax deaths so far had no known association with contaminated mail. The two women lived in the Bronx in New York City, and in Oxford, Connecticut. But both places lie on a straight line running 47 degrees northeast from Trenton.
Martin Furmanski, a researcher based in Newport Beach, California, says this exactly matches the wind bearing on 9 October - 220 and 230 degrees - the day the anthrax-laced letters were processed in Trenton. The wind was also "brisk", he says, between 11 and 21 kilometres per hour.
There was also a major temperature inversion that night, which would have trapped air masses close to the ground and prevented turbulence and vertical mixing.
He estimates that contaminated air under these conditions should have covered a band about four kilometres wide - like the plume that killed more than 100 people in Sverdlovsk, Siberia in 1979 after anthrax escaped from a bioweapons plant. If so, 3.6 million people in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut could have been exposed.
Single spore
Military experiments using safe bacilli similar to anthrax have found bacteria 725 kilometres downwind of release sites, says Furmanski. "Exposures so far downwind would almost certainly be limited to a single spore," he admits. "But there is good evidence that a single inhaled anthrax spore is capable of causing fatal disease," especially if a large population is exposed.
Although there were four different strains in the mixture that escaped at Sverdlovsk, seven of the 11 cases in which the anthrax was genetically analysed were stricken with bacilli of only one strain. This suggests, says Furmanski, that the infections stemmed from only one inhaled spore.
Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, who analysed the release at Sverdlovsk, calls the theory "a long shot". He observes that Furmanski's calculations predict that the contaminated plume would have arrived in Oxford, Connecticut between 0400 and 0600 - when Ottilie Lundgren, the 94-year-old victim, was unlikely to be outdoors.
But there was almost certainly an aerosol of anthrax spores released at Trenton. Two workers there contracted inhalational anthrax, and a woman working at an unrelated office nearby developed cutaneous disease. Furmanski suggests that the medical records of people downwind of Trenton might show if any more cases were missed.
18:10 14 December 01 |
