So now we’re testing and finding anthrax all over the place. Have tests been done in, say, Peoria, or Manchester or San Antonio or Boise? How do we not know that all of these findings in mailrooms around DC wouldn’t occur any time a tremendously thorough search for a specific microbe was undertaken? (Though I assume it is very peculiar to find anthrax in an urban building, but then again, how do we know?)
There is anthrax just about every where a dead animal lays on the ground.
If someone died of anthrax in Lower Podunk, then Lower Podunk will be tested for anthrax. You can’t test the whole planet for it.
I’m well aware that we can’t test the entire planet for anthrax. But without a baseline, how are we to know if the levels of anthrax found in the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research mailroom and the Department of Agriculture, for example, are unusual? Wouldn’t it make sense to carry out similar tests in Des Moines or elsewhere, so as to make sure we’re not making a mountain out of a molehill?
Ahhh, now the OP makes more sense.
I believe that the interior of buildings shouldn’t have any anthrax. Unless you regularly drive cattle or process animal hides in your building.
If there was a certain baseline level of anthrax in the US, there should be a certain baseline level of anthrax deaths in the US. There isn’t. Almost all recent anthrax deaths, AFAIK, have been linked to tainted mail. The current wave is the first group of inhalation anthrax cases since the 1970s. So that would seem to be a strong argument against the baseline anthrax hypothesis.
Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t natural anthrax. It exists in certain areas of the country, like Texas, but it isn’t everywhere. I don’t think anthrax exists naturally in the DC area, for example.
Cite?
Do you believe anthrax causes all animal deaths? Or that anthrax appears as a result of animal death? Or that all animals carry a certain amount of anthrax?
What is your source for this statement?
- Rick
[quote]
If there was a certain baseline level of anthrax in the US, there should be a certain baseline level of anthrax deaths in the US.
[quote]
That’s not true. If in fact it takes inhaling 8,000 to 10,000 spores to bring about inhalation anthrax, 100 spores lying around in a mailroom wouldn’t cause any deaths. Many of the findings of anthrax have been very low concentrations.
I submit that if there is anthrax benignly lying about in DC, the Walter Reed research facility and the Department of Agriculture are two of the most likely places it would be. As for the mailrooms, there’s a tremendous amount of traffic in and out of mail processing facilities–letters from all over the country (and world) and people in and out every day, all bringing who knows what in with them.
Furthermore (and further down the list of likelihood), DC is not all that far removed from agricultural areas, and is not all that far in time from being much more agricultural. Conceivably, all of the development (and continued development) in the area uncovers spores that have been in the soil for some time.
Having said all of that, I am reasonably certain that the anthrax has most likely been artificially introduced. But unless tests are (or have been?) done in areas far removed from the NY-DC area, how can we know for sure? The picture sure would change if trace amounts of anthrax were found in mailrooms and hospitals and elsewhere in other locations around the country.
Okay, here is a different question which can help clarify the OP:
How many deaths occurred due to Anthrax in the United States prior to September 11?
Acceptable answers can refer to the period from 7/4/1776 to 9/11/2001 or any subset thereof. Thank you.
Geez, I hate to have every other post in a thread, but…I’m not at all concerned with anthrax deaths. What I want to know is what is the “background” presence of anthrax in the environment in general, and in indoor environments in particular. This is similar to the question of “how much arsenic naturally occurs in drinking water.” There is some arsenic in many public water supplies, but no deaths are directly attributed to it, and those that are are statistical.
To clarify the OP, the question asked is “How do we know that it’s unusual to find several hundred anthrax spores inside a building?”
Well, I wondered about the “background” level, too, from the first week, but I haven’t been able to find anything on it. I take that to mean that there isn’t a background level. I mean, why should there be? Nothing like this has ever happened before, so there was never any reason for any researchers to go around and test for background levels of anthrax spores. Anthrax was just always one of those vaguely agricultural diseases, like hoof-and-mouth, that popped up every so often in the back pages of the Sunday paper, “Anthrax outbreak in Lower Slobbovia”, etc.
The Better Half says no, they are not sweeping the Lower Podunk Post Office for anthrax spores, and that they made an announcement to that effect. “No, we’re not testing the postal facility for spores.” They’re not doing nasal swabs, either.
He points out that obviously, because of the sheer logistics of the thing, not to mention the expense, they just can’t test all of the thousands of postal facilities.
A female letter carrier here went to her doctor last week with “flu-like symptoms”, and the doctor called the police, who observed while the doctor examined her, filled out a report, and said if she didn’t have anthrax they would throw the report away. She was not tested for anthrax.
She just had the flu.
This is an excellent question, and one that I would be greatly interested in knowing the answer to. The question has been rattling around in my head for the last few weeks as well.
In short, if anthrax is “naturally occurring,” long-lasting, and may be found in the soil (which may be tracked inside buildings via people’s shoes), it stands to reason that there should be some background level that is generally too low to cause the disease in humans.
So what is this background level? I find it hard to believe that it is zero. As a grad student in Environmental Engineering, I’m telling you that virtually nothing has a concentration of zero. This is why we report results for contaminants as ND (non-detect), rather than zero.
johnson, Duck Duck Goose, and others: This is exactly what my husband and I have been wondering.
I’d love to know some firm answers. Could you test anywhere and find anthrax, if you just looked hard enough? When you hear about how long-lived those spores are, you’d have to believe that little traces of it (mostly harmless) would be, well, everywhere. Compare it to how much cocaine they say in on U.S. Money–doesn’t seem that antrhwax being everywhere would be all that farfetched.
There’s cocaine on U.S. money?
No wonder it’s worth more than my Canadian cash.
But wait…
cocaine = white powder
anthrax = white powder
Are you sure that’s cocaine on your money?
d
BTW if you now don’t feel safe with that risky cash in your pocket I will be glad to dispose of it for you. I have a special facility here that does just that. (it’s called the mall) Just put all your suspected cash in a sealed envelope and send it to…
d
Okay, try this:
Either it is unusual to find several hundred anthrax spores inside a building, or it is not unusual to find several hundred anthrax spores inside a building.
If it is unusual, then what that means is that of the many buildings they’ve been testing, the great majority of them have fewer than several hundred anthrax spores inside.
If it is not unusual, then what that means is that of the many buildings they’ve been testing, the great majority of them do have several hundred anthrax spores inside. But if that’s the case, then why the hell are they bothering to test at all. Which, I suppose, is your question to begin with.
So the obvious answer is that in most of the buildings they test, they really are finding a small number of spores, if any at all.
So now anthrax has apparently been found in the US embassy in Lithuania. I’m not a terrorist, but to my mind, the Lithuanian embassy ranks pretty far down the list of American outposts to target.
I’ll ask again, just one more time, how do we know we wouldn’t find anthrax anywhere we look very closely for it?
Geez, I thought you were kidding. 
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/11/02/lithuania.anthrax/index.html
Sorry, I still haven’t seen any info on background levels, and ya know, I don’t think anybody knows. I think there’s just like “Zero Data”, period. I think this is going to be a tremendous Learning Experience for the entire scientific community, and in years to come they’ll all look back and say, “Ah, the Anthrax Scare…” the way they look back and say, “Ah, the Manhattan Project…”
How do we know we wouldn’t find it everywhere we looked closely? Because we haven’t. Every government mail room in DC has been or is in the process of being tested for anthrax. The majority of them have come back negative. This indicates (to me at least) that the levels in those buildings indicated as having tested positive exceed the standard background (if there is one). Otherwise all the federal buildings and post offices tested would have come back with positive results.