I have started.
For starters, I am no longer drinking my sodas straight from the can. I use a straw or pour it into a cup with ice.
So what changes, if any, have you* made?
Quasi
Nothing.
I am not going to let the terrorists win by making me change the way I live. I will still fly (flew back home on the Monday following the tragedy) and visit important places and generally do what I do.
Slight caveat, I do live in the UK, but we have been named as a target also.
Rick
I’m on Cipro right now, but not because of anthrax. But if anyone has any suspicious mail they’d like opened, just let me know.
Me too! I’ll help! Cipro for 6 days so far… Sophie, is your pain gone yet?
Ginger, you are sweet to ask. Yes. The pain in my back is gone daddy gone. Thank god.
I’m not doing anything different either.
I mean, as it is now, I’m statistically more likely to get mugged than I am to get anthrax.
And when it comes to getting mugged, I don’t know what I’d do to try and avoid that either.
If it happens, it happens… I’ll deal with it then.
I like livin’ on the edge baby!!
Yeah, a friend of mine started “not breathing”, that works. hehe.
I, for one, am not going to open any of those credit card offers any more.
oh…
uuhh, never mind
Guess I haven’t changed my lifestyle.
My father has stated that all mail and newspapers should be put in the garage and opened there. He claims he was thinking of that way before then. Right dad.
Well, I’ve always been Anti-Anthrax. Anthrax sucks. I might like them better if they’d learn to carry a tune, or at least do something about that hair, fercryinoutloud, but noooooo, they’ve just got to keep on suckin’…
Oh wait, you mean the disease, don’t you?
[sub]boy, is my face red…[/sub]
Mine finally subsided today. Finally.
Well, the Post Office is handing out latex gloves and face masks to anyone who wants them, but the Better Half reports that hardly anyone is using them. One (female) letter carrier dutifully put on the gloves and cased mail that way for a while, but when she came back from the bathroom, it was without the gloves, having caught one in her trouser zipper, a fact that occasioned much innocent hilarity on the workroom floor. Subsequently she decided that, faced with the choice between catching anthrax, or hearing any more zipper jokes, she’d rather have anthrax, so she’s casing her mail barehanded now.
As someone who grew up in an agricultural region of a highly agricultural country, I sit in astonishment that so many people on this MB seem not to have heard of anthrax before S11. I’m sure you’ve all heard of foot and mouth disease, I’m sure you’ve all heard of BSE, I’m sure you’ve all heard of tuberculosis. All of these diseases infect livestock year in year out; they always have. So does anthrax; it always did.
Have we become such a “supermarket culture” in my lifetime that people aren’t aware of the existence of these diseases?
I so want to rip the OP a new one right now. There are very many “agricultural” diseases worldwide (and anthrax is primarily and agricultural disease, just as BSE is) where Western food standards have some kind of “tolerance” limit. The most pertinent example I can think of offhand is tuberculosis in my country in the dairy farming industry. Milk from tubercular cows is not rejected out of hand, it’s diluted with the milk of healthy cows to come within the food safety guidelines.
Anti-anthrax lifestyle? Not really. I’m essentially the girl who you could never take away from the farm who always grew up with an awareness of those pesky microbes around you which could suddenly wipe out this year’s herd or crop. Anthrax didn’t scare me much then (except for the fact that it’s appearance would have meant slaughtering the total herd including my favourite calf), it doesn’t much scare me now.
I repeat, if these people were truly serious and had any kind of bio-terrorism capability whatsoever, anthrax wouldn’t be their disease of choice.
Not a thing different for me. I work around pathogens every day, not a large deal.
Well, okay reprise, you’ve convinced me of “the error of my ways”. Henceforth I’ll not only drink from the can, but also lick the top of it. If one of my patients is in respiratory isolation, I will not wear a mask gown or gloves to protect myself or them from me. I will no longer pay attention to the Walk, Don’t Walk signs, and even better, I’ll stick my head in the sand and pretend those dangers just don’t exist for me. How’s that?
I post a thread about taking precautions against Anthrax and you want to rip me a new one?
Jesus! :rolleyes:
Quasi
I’ve attached the story URL and the part that really gets me going. I know that at least 5 people touch your mail before you get it. Now I have to worry about envelopes laden with this stuff that might cling to my envelopes (random for sure). I don’t feel safe. I want my mail banged around a little outside to knock off any dust. I may even start opening it outside as a precaution, not as a lazy day kind of thing just reading my mail on the porch…
I don’t want my children exposed especially. So I’m aware of things around us more. And I am grateful.
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/011021/11/news-attacks-anthrax
Sen. Bill Frist, a doctor before he joining the Senate, said the victim faces a more uncertain future than those who were exposed through the skin. The only person to die from anthrax during this scare had the inhalation form of the disease, though it was not caught as early.
“It’s tragic news,” said Frist, R-Tenn., on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “On the other hand, hopefully it’s been diagnosed at a time where even with inhalation … it can be treated. It’s not obviously as certain as the cutaneous (skin) or other sort of exposure instances are.”
Frist added that this man must have been exposed to a more intense form of the bacterium, strong enough to move through is respiratory track and deep into his lungs.
“Obviously when that postal worker touched it, it was in a more concentrated, virile form,”
Frist said. The senator offered a possible scenario for exposure: “As the postal machinery and sometimes the workers compress it, the anthrax then can come out. Most of the envelopes were sealed all around, and the theory is that it came out in a burst of air and that’s how it’s inhaled.”
On Saturday, the anthrax threat widened as health inspectors found the potentially deadly bacteria in a mail bundling machine in a House office building just a few blocks from the Capitol.
Nope, but maybe people have been equally misinformed as I was. I was taught in school that people couldn’t get it, so it came as a shock when the first reports came in.
As for the OP I’m probably more likely to have a tree fall on me, so I haven’t changed a thing.
I’m not doing anything different. Frankly, the odds of my getting anthrax now are pretty much the same as they were before all of this started - next to none. Even if I do get it, it’s treatable.
Remember, in a nation of some 285 million, only 32 people have been exposed, nine have been confirmed infected, and one has died.
I’m more afraid of being hit by a car in a crosswalk.
I have stopped snorting powder that comes in unsolicited mail.
Seriously, I really haven’t taken any specific precautions. I am just a little more aware of small details of previously mudane things. For example, I check to see if unsolicited mail comes with a return address. I hardly obsess in any way at all on it as I know that chances I will come in contact with a biological agent of terrorism are quite slim.
Wow DuckDuckGoose, my post office hasn’t offered ANY help regarding anthrax, except a meeting about what things we should treat as “suspect”. However, when a carrier found a package in a drop box meeting the criteria, the supervisors told him “Don’t worry about it, just bring it in.”
I figure if I find anything suspect I’m passing it around, so I can be “decontaiminated” with all my favorite coworkers. (kidding…)