WHOEVER has been mailing them must be delighted. For the price of a few
stamps and precious little actual anthrax, they have succeeded in spreading
panic across the globe and endowing white powders of all kinds with the power to
clear buildings and ground planes. Even a Florida postmark can now strike fear.
In a world made so jittery, even the clumsiest hoaxer cannot fail to get a
result. We all feel less safe. Terror has triumphed.
But why has it triumphed? Certainly not because of the reality of the anthrax
threat. One death so far and several dozen individuals on antibiotics is bad
enough. But it isn鈥檛 exactly carnage. This campaign is nothing like the
confidently predicted bioterrorism scenario of a lone airplane releasing
plague-inducing clouds over a city and killing millions.
Indeed, if the past couple of weeks have taught us anything, it is that
anthrax, at least when delivered this way, is a pretty hopeless way of killing
anyone. Once people suspect the germ is being used, much of the danger
disappears. You have to inhale it to be in serious trouble and even then
antibiotics will protect you provided you realise what is going on. The germ
cannot be passed on to someone else: even if these mailings continue, there will
be no great epidemic. Common or garden influenza virus would probably do more
harm.
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Yet wielded at just the right moment anthrax is clearly a devastatingly sharp
instrument of terror, for the simple reason that people associate it with
experiments in biological warfare and therefore fear it out of all proportion to
the harm such limited quantities are likely to do.
For this Britain, Russia and the US are all culpable, for it was in their
bioweapons labs in the 1940s and 1950s that anthrax acquired its terrifying
reputation. A Russian cluster bomb filled with an antibiotic-resistant strain of
anthrax would be truly terrifying. So would a smallpox attack. But the letters
are weapons more deserving of the prefix 鈥減sycho鈥� than 鈥渂io鈥�. The idea of
anthrax is currently doing far more damage to the world than the bacillus
itself. And depressingly, the myths and half-truths about it just keep
coming.
Some in Washington, for instance, seeking to drum up support for a military
attack on Iraq, have been claiming that airborne anthrax spores can only be
produced by a government. Not a bit of it. Experiments in the US have proved
that all you need to produce a kilo of perfectly inhalable anthrax spores is a
little money, a 50-litre fermenter and some ordinary milling machinery to grind
up the bacterial cultures. Iraq may or may not be involved in these letters, but
spore size alone proves nothing. In fact, judging from the strain of bacteria
apparently involved, this anthrax could just as easily have been brewed inside
the US.
It鈥檚 wrong too to suggest this is the first time a bioweapon has been used on
the American public. In 1984 some 750 people in Oregon were infected by food
that had been sprinkled with Salmonella. Initially, no one noticed this
was a deliberate attack; it only came to light when the FBI raided the premises
of a local religious cult and found equipment for cultivating bacteria. If we
have forgotten this incident it is because we associate Salmonella with
eggs and poor poultry husbandry, not biowarfare and scientists in moonsuits.
None of which is to imply that the current anthrax crisis is a fuss about
nothing. The level of fear might be unjustified, but the nationwide scope of
these letter attacks certainly means people in the US and beyond are right to
feel they could be the next targets. A line has been crossed. More germ attacks
are likely. Now perhaps there鈥檒l be adequate funding to develop the technologies
to protect the public that biologists have been clamouring for. Spotting anthrax
in a suspicious sample of white powder or inside a patient still takes too long.
Frighteningly, the infection that raised the alarm鈥攁nd hence drew much of
the danger out of the present attacks鈥攚as diagnosed largely by luck rather
than the presence of a ubiquitous surveillance system. If that case had occurred
in Arkansas or Karachi the death certificate would like as not have simply read
鈥减苍别耻尘辞苍颈补鈥�.
A clutch of automated diagnostic devices for detecting anthrax have been in
development for several years. The job now is to get them into the hands of
doctors and nurses. And to set up a worldwide network to keep much closer tabs
on outbreaks of infectious diseases of all kinds.
It may not be cheap or easy, but in the end eternal vigilance is the only
reliable antidote to terror and panic.