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Politics : Homeland Security -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (35)	10/25/2001 11:08:09 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 827

I've posted quite a bit about anthrax over the past few weeks, like many others, many of them actual doctors and scientists, not armchair pundits. I just don't feel like re-posting what I already posted, because I am too lazy to bookmark and don't feel like re-doing the research. So just a few tidbits. The revelations about Daschle's anthrax intrigues me and bemuses me, primarily the simultaneous assertions by the Washington Post that the technology for coating the spores is sophisticated, and was developed in the 1960's. Science has come a long way since the 1960's. Anthrax is a bacillus, which means that it is a bacteria which is rod-shaped. In other words, it's long and skinny. The length is 3-6 microns, but the width is only maybe 0.5 microns. It is remarkably similar to bacillus cereus, which causes food poisoning, and bacillus thuringiensis, which is sprayed all over American to kill gypsy moths. One of the characteristics of certain varieties of bacilli is that they form spores under the right conditions. The spores are called endospores. These spores are called endospores, because they form inside the bacteria - a bacteria is a one-celled organism - and the external part of the bacteria is shed when the bacteria turns into a spore. The process by which a bacillus turns into a spore is called sporulation. The outside wall of bacillus anthracis spores is very tough, very hard, very resistant to the elements. The material it is made of is called peptidoglycan, and it is keratin like, that is, it resembles the material from which our hairs and fingernails are made. Hair and fingernails are very tough, and can survive for centuries in the right environment. Apparently it is easy to induce the colonies to sporulate based on the culture medium. With the right culture medium, most sporulating bacilli will form spores. One spore per bacteria. It seems to me that once you have cultured a lot of spores, the next thing to do is to get rid of the culture medium, through chemical and mechanical means. Then you have relatively pure spores, which have a natural external cell wall that is very tough. The leftovers, once dried, can be milled, that is, ground into powder. The question then becomes, what do you add to the "batter" to keep the spores from clumping together? The material in Daschle's office was both finely ground and had some form of additive to keep the spores from clumping together, apparently something which caused the spores to have a charge which caused them to repel each other. It may come as something of a relief to know that this does not appear to have an easy answer via the Internet. I have no idea whether the answer was easy to find a month ago. Nor do I have any idea whether the answer is easy to find in a good university library, off line. I have some guesses, and I know where I would go to find the answers.