A Rare Scare - A media report of a probable disaster (i.e.. death, earthquake, cancer risk from eating apples, etc.), where the probability is considerably lower than risks taken everyday (i.e.. getting in a car wreck on your way to school). - The Glossary of Mathematical Mistakes
Last month I said that it was too early to do a "rare scare", but this month we have been inundated with countless reports of Anthrax this and Anthrax that. I can't take it anymore.
Before the September 11th attacks, the big headlines were about shark attacks. So widespread were reports of shark attacks, Congress was looking into the matter. After September 11th, we did not hear anything about sharks again.
There are two kinds of risks reported in the media: those that really matter and those that sell papers. Reports of shark attacks disappeared because they were the latter, they sold papers.
The anthrax scare has been the subject of the news through most of October. Is it a risk that really matters or is it a risk that just sells papers? Well, for all intents and purposes it is the latter. Anthrax should be a non-issue.
"The bad guys know how to start a bio-panic. Don't go for the jugular. Go for the megaphone. Hit the media and the politicians. They have unique access to the national consciousness, and they have been filling it with all-anthrax all-the-time." - Charles Krauthammer, columnist Washington Post
Why should we not be concerned about Anthrax?
First of all, lets call these anthrax attacks what they are: attempted murder. It is not really a weapon of mass destruction designed to kill hundreds, it is like a letter bomb designed to kill whoever opens the letter. This kind of attack is far more dangerous to the person sending the letters than to the people receiving the letters. Sending more than a handful of these letters would be fatal to the sender, so do not expect a mass mailing of anthrax infested letters.
In the past, there have been attempts to turn anthrax into a bioweapon. It has proven to be very difficult to make and very ineffective as a weapon of mass destruction. Anthrax is not the virulent killer it is made out to be. To be a really deadly bioweapon, the anthrax has to be made into a fine powder that stays in the air (also known as "weapons grade") and it has to be resistant to antibiotics. Tests on the anthrax obtained from the letters indicate it is not weapons grade, nor is it antibiotic resistant.
"If enough spores were dropped, some people conceivably may inhale enough to become infected. But in the worst-case, this might happen to dozens, rather than thousands of people. An accidental release of anthrax spores at a Soviet bio-weapons laboratory in 1979 resulted in about 70 deaths in a metropolitan area of about one million people." - Steven Milloy, Junkscience.com
Second reason not to fear anthrax. So far there have only been sixteen confirmed cases of anthrax with four deaths. Every report about anthrax beyond these sixteen cases were cases of "exposure" to anthrax. Guess what? You too have probably been exposed to anthrax at some point in the past and not even noticed any symptoms. Anthrax is a bacteria that occurs naturally in our soil in trace amounts. Its biggest source is dead livestock carcasses (cattle and sheep mostly) which are raised all over the world. It no doubt occasionally gets into our food and into our lungs and into our blood stream. We are naturally immune to trace amounts of anthrax spores, it is only in large doses in which it becomes deadly. Laboratory studies indicate that about 10,000 spores are necessary to start an infection by inhalation. It is not a virus, it is not contagious and it is treatable by antibiotics.
Anthrax "exposure" is far more common than you think, and yet the disease is rarely contracted by humans.
"Anthrax benefits from killing its
host, which is usually a grazing animal. The animal dies and rots into the soil.
There, the bacteria revert to their spore state, waiting, sometimes for years,
until another animal comes by and ingests the spore as it grazes or perhaps gets
some infected dirt into a cut. Luckily, naturally occurring Bacillus anthracis
is easy to kill, succumbing to a wide range of antibiotics from penicillin to
ciprofloxacin." - Maggie
Fox, Reuters Health and Science Correspondent
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Third reason, this is truly a rare scare. In the month of October, sixteen people have contracted anthrax and four people have died as a result. In the same month, an estimated 3400 new cases of HIV have been diagnosed, and an estimated 1400 people have died from AIDS or AIDS related causes in the United States. Also, in the same month, approximately 200,000 cases of influenza or pneumonia were diagnosed by doctors and approximately 2200 people died from influenza or pneumonia in the United States alone. The chance of being killed by an anthrax terrorist attack is so small, you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than getting anthrax from reading the mail.
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"A New York Times article on Tuesday quoted a bioterrorism expert named Amy Smithson: "Welcome to our generation's Blitz. We are going to have to get hardened up here." Yes, and a good way to start getting hardened up would be not to compare a scare that, as of Ms. Smithson's utterance, had claimed precisely one life to the Nazi air war against Britain. Between September 1940 and May 1941, the bombing of Britain took more than 40,000 lives. A campaign to spread fear by sending anthrax spores to media and political targets is not the same as two years of air raids and 40,000 dead. It is not the same as 5,000 dead either. To confuse mass fear with mass murder is an embarrassment -- and, worse, an insult to the dead and the destroyed of Sept. 11." - Michael Kelly, editor of National Journal
Fourth reason, when you consider how much the hoaxes and false reports are costing emergency services -- and we have not even reached the heart of the cold and flu season that could choke the health care system if enough people come in to be tested for anthrax -- the fear generated by the reports in the media are far more destructive than the attacks themselves. This is a case where we would be better off ignoring the threat than giving into the hype. The source of the envelopes need to be investigated, but we really do not need to inform the authorities for every residual left behind from powdered donuts.
All of the cases of confirmed anthrax contamination have been in the mail rooms of major media sources and congressional leaders. They targeted those places which would get the biggest headlines. The goal here is obviously to scare people. If their goal was to actually kill people, they have failed.
"But in my opinion we need to protect the Americans not from anthrax, but from the feeling of fear. ... I'm serious. ... Panic is even worse than the disease." - Benjamin Cherkassky, a senior scientist at Moscow's Central Institute of Epidemiology
So in summary: Anthrax is an ineffective bioweapon, anthrax "exposure" is far more common and far less virulent than its reputation makes it seem, the chances of being infected is very remote, and the fear of anthrax is far more damaging than the disease itself.
Act smart, do not give into the hysteria.
Last Updated November 1, 2001