Anthrax Q & A, Update on State of Cases in the U.S.

Complete article highlighting some key facts regarding anthrax, followed by excerpts of news articles detailing the extent of the infection events in the U.S. ...

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What causes anthrax?

Anthrax is caused by the organism Bacillus anthracis. In some parts of the world, this can be found in cattle or other hoofed mammals.

It is infrequent in western Europe and the US, and is more likely to be found in animals in south and central America, south and east Europe, Asia and Africa.

This bacteria can form spores which can either be eaten in contaminated meat, breathed in, or simply infect the skin directly through human to animal contact.

What are the symptoms?

There are three types of anthrax, depending on where the infectious spore has arrived on the patient.

The first, cutaneous anthrax, is the least serious of the three, and produces a skin lesion, which is rarely painful. However, if left untreated, the infection can spread and cause blood poisoning, which is fatal in one in 20 cases.

The second type is intestinal anthrax, caused by the consumption of contaminated meat. This produces severe food-poisoning type symptoms, leading to fever and blood poisoning. It is frequently fatal.

The third is respiratory anthrax, which happens when spores are breathed in by the patient and lodge in the lung. Symptoms of this disease start out as similar to simple flu, but respiratory symptoms rapidly worsen and the patient usually goes into some kind of shock between two and six days later. Again, this is frequently fatal.

Is anthrax contagious?

No. It is an infectious disease, but not contagious. An infectious illness spreads and grows within the body, a contagious disease spreads from person to person. Because the disease is not contagious, only those directly exposed to the spores have any chance of falling ill.

How deadly is it?

A 1993 report estimated that releasing a cloud of 100kg of spores upwind of Washington DC could cause between 130,000 and 3m deaths.

Does exposure always mean infection?

Being exposed to anthrax spores does not necessarily mean that you will develop an infection. Many of the spores are dormant, and pose no threat. In addition, infection will only result if sufficient numbers of the spores germinate and release harmful bacteria in sufficient quantities.

Bacillus anthracis spores

Small amounts of the bacteria can be killed off by the body's immune system. It is estimated that 10,000 spores are needed to cause infection. Once anthrax spores have lodged in the lung and caused an infection, nine out of 10 patients die.

Can anthrax be treated?

Giving antibiotics to anthrax patients can cure the disease, particularly the cutaneous variety. The antibiotic of choice is ciprofloxacin, or Cipro. However, unless it is given swiftly after intestinal or respiratory infection, the chances of cure are greatly reduced.

Is there a vaccine?

There is a vaccine against anthrax, but this is not recommended except for those at high risk, such as meat industry workers and laboratory scientists handling the disease.

Is it easy to make?

Culturing large quantities of anthrax spores is a complicated task, but certainly not beyond the capacity of many nations. During the 1990s, it was suggested that at least 17 nations had some biological weapons capacity.

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Source:

• BBC

Excerpt from article describing a letter containing anthrax (per preliminary tests) received today by the office of Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle:

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... President Bush announced the delivery of the deadly bacteria after a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"His office received a letter and it had anthrax in it," Bush said. "The letter was field-tested. And the staffers that have been exposed are being treated."

... Today's discovery in Washington comes after anthrax was detected in three states over the past 10 days: In Florida, one man died and five others have been infected; in New York, at least one woman has contracted a skin form of the anthrax disease; and in Nevada, all workers who handled a letter mailed from Malaysia have tested negative for anthrax.

The package, sent to Daschle's personal office in the Hart Building just several hundred yards from the Capitol, "had been wrapped a lot," Bush said. Other sources said the envelope was taped tightly, perhaps to elude chemical scanning. Inside the envelope was a powdery substance.

Some Postal Workers
Playing It Safe

Sources close to the investigation said the package was postmarked Trenton. An envelope containing anthrax sent to NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw also originated in the New Jersey capital. ...

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Source:

• Washington Post

Excerpt from article describing a case of a child of an ABC News employee in New York discovered to have skin anthrax.

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... the baby boy of an ABC News employee had tested positive for cutaneous anthrax - a less dangerous form of the disease absorbed through cuts or scratches on the skin.

The child, who is reported to be responding well to treatment, had briefly visited ABC's New York newsroom on 28 September.

Police are now questioning ABC employees and conducting environmental searches at ABC and other media organisations. ...

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Source:

• BBC

There Is No God?

If you define god as the

• be-all
• end-all
• over-all
• super-knowing
• super-creator
  
• super-immortalizing
• prayer-answering
• intervening
• loving
• caring
• master beyond master ...

... of all that ever has been, is, will be, or can be, you know, the generally perceived god of christian / muslim / jewish fame ...

... in order to claim that such an entity exists, one must solve the inconsistencies present in such an all-encompassing all-involved entity that cannot logically be both omnipotent and omniscient.

Furthermore, one would be well-served to ponder the following reasonable analysis ...

• Naturalism explains all that is known.

• God explains nothing but human desire to reach into the unknown and create a human-centric super-being, as humans created them, over 1,800 well-known ones, to satisfy an array of
  
  
  • wants,
    
    
  • needs,
    
    
  • fears,
    
    
  • desires ...
    
    
• ... rather than god revealed itself to humans in ______ (insert huge list of irreconcilable and logically inconsistent claims without one iota of evidence that any of them were -or- are anything but human imagination).

An omnipotent god could reveal itself to the world in any of innumerable indisputable ways. A nonexistent god cannot. A god made-up by ancients cannot, will never
reveal itself in an indisputable way. Why?

Because the god of the ancients is demonstrably "make believe", logically
impossible, never really existed, and cannot exist in the physical world or the logical world.

That god of human construction can only exist in the human imagination and even there, it still fails to mate to logic or reason, for the imaginary world has no need for such things.

There are no limits on what the human imagination can concoct when it comes to god. It's like the absence of logical restraint in dreams.

Into the incomprehensible, into the unknown, one would be wise to place a naturalistic fate and a naturalistic state of being.

Put another way ...

Know not god ...

... and all that is beyond the capability of humans to know and comprehend, all that has been 'til now called god, is known by those for whom god is neither comprehended, claimed, or known ...

From Alan Watts' -The Wisdom of Insecurity- ...

"... The Hindu Upanishads say:

He who thinks that god is not comprehended, by him god is comprehended; but he who thinks that god is comprehended knows him not - god is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all."

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I would interpret that liberally and perceive that in knowing god is incomprehensible and in knowing not god, those of the disbelief / doubt / distance from faith community are closer to knowing the whys and wherefores of "all that is", a concept commonly called god, than are those of the religious / faith crowd who claim to know god.

Source:

• Pro-Humanist FREELOVER

Excerpts from article describing the latest planetary discoveries, bringing the total number of extra-solar planets to 74 :

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Artist's Depiction of Newly Discovered World

An international team of astronomers has discovered eight new extra-solar planets. Three of them are Jupiter-sized planets in circular orbits around their parent stars.

"Previous planets were very different from our own," says Dr Hugh Jones, of Liverpool John Moores University, "We're now starting to see, if not twins, then second cousins."

These planets constitute a new class of extra-solar giant planets with orbits similar to that of the Earth and Mars in our Solar System. The eight new worlds bring the total number of planets known to be circling other stars to 74.

They have orbital periods between six days and six years. They orbit their stars at distances ranging from about 0.7 to 3 times the Earth-Sun distance. ...

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Source:

• BBC

Baboons Found to be Capable of Abstract Reasoning

Excerpt from articles detailing scientific tests which indicate baboons can analyze and compare objects on a level of understanding previously unevidenced in non-human, non-ape primates:

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Baboons are capable of performing complex tasks that involve abstract reasoning, a mental ability that only humans and some chimpan-zees were thought to possess, researchers say.

Humans and baboons
diverged 30 million years ago

In a series of experiments, researchers at the University of Iowa showed that two baboons could become adept at understanding and identifying abstract relationships between patterns of pictures of objects.

It is the first time that a non-human, non-ape primate has been shown to have the capacity for abstract thought, psychologists say.

Baboons are part of an evolutionary fork about 30 million years ago. As "old-world monkeys", they have no linguistic ability and were thought to possess less sophisticated reasoning abilities.

Their ability to perform abstract thinking provides an important clue into how - and whether - language affects the mind's ability to perform complex tasks of reasoning, researchers say.

... The team believes its experiments show baboons are capable of analogous thinking, a trait usually only attributed to humans and chimpanzees.

... The research is likely to provoke discussion because baboons belong to a primate family which split around 30 million years ago from the ancestors which gave rise to humans and chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and humans are much more closely related.

"Analogical thinking and its possible precursors may very well be found in nonhuman animals - if only we assiduously look for them. The search may be long and hard...," write the research team.

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Sources:

• Sydney Morning Herald [link inactive]
• BBC

Time for the Ground War?

After a week of air strikes in Afghanistan, the next moves, political and military, are beginning to find their way to the array of special forces united to put an end to seeds of global terrorism and an ongoing humanitarian disaster in one of the harshest locales on earth:

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Down And Dirty

After a week of air strikes in Afghanistan, U.S. special forces are putting boots on the ground.

... The silent war against terrorism--the one that takes place in police stations, law courts and banks--isn't over and won't be for years. But last week the noisy war, the one marked by percussive blasts that shake mountains, by the rattle of small-arms fire and the air-sucking whump of a fuel-air explosive, finally started.

Like all battles, it had an other-worldly quality. The cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs that thudded into Afghanistan, the B-2 Stealth bombers, half-circling the globe from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Central Asia, all seem more at home in a science-fiction novel than on the evening news.

But stripped to its essence, this new form of war is as old as the hills. Victory still requires one group of men to find and kill another. Technology can't do it all. "The cruise missiles and bombers are not going to solve this problem," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week.

... Special forces are going to carry a greater share of the burden than in any war ever waged by the U.S. Already, sources tell TIME, a number of Delta Force commandos and CIA agents, together with members of the elite British SAS 22nd regiment, are in eastern Afghanistan, conducting strategic reconnaissance of targets linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

Special-operations soldiers are thought to be acting as spotters for the bombing raids; a senior diplomatic source in Paris says a small number of French intelligence agents in Afghanistan are also helping identify targets.

A Green Beret contingent is on its way to act as liaison and to train officers with the Taliban's opponents in the Northern Alliance.

For President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and their soldiers, the moment of pivot has come.

... If the war is now real for Americans, it is no less so for Afghans, even though those who live in that Texas-size country have been fighting the Soviets or one another for more than 20 years.

... Special forces are going to have to do the dirty work. It won't be easy.

The U.S. has three options for running commandos into Afghanistan. It can use the bases in Pakistan or Uzbekistan; it can establish a temporary camp in Afghanistan; or it can use the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, now loading up in Oman, as a base for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Army's commando chopper unit.

The first is politically sensitive; nobody's eager to do the second; so even though forces may use Pakistani bases for refueling and emergencies, the Kitty Hawk, sailing in the Arabian Sea, is likely to be the primary base of sustained special operations.

Once in theater, much of the work of tracking down bin Laden and his lieutenants will fall to the supersecret Delta Force. Forming into 15- to 21-man troops or four- to six-man teams, they will chopper into place, flying into canyons under cover of darkness.

Then, protected by Kevlar body armor, they will fast-rope to the ground, bending under the weight of night-sighted M-4 carbines and grenade launchers, carrying radios and handheld global-positioning gear.

Some of the teams will feature snipers; others will race across the desert in specially equipped dune buggies; yet others will practice their mountaineering skills, crawling over Afghanistan's rugged mountains.

For many search-and-destroy missions, the aim will be to get in and out so fast that forces stay on the ground in Afghanistan for less than an hour.

... And then there is--apart from the skinning alive--Afghanistan's most frightening contribution to modern warfare: the cave. Afghanistan's limestone cliffs are honeycombed with them, many with multiple entrances and all of them capable of being booby-trapped.

Pentagon officials are convinced that bin Laden and his top associates are holed up in caves and that they might move to a different one every day.

Some are big enough to be seen in satellite images, and the Air Force has already targeted them. GBU-28 bunker-buster bombs can drill like masonry bits through 20 ft. of stone before detonating, and B-2s dropped the behemoths on several caves last week.

Pentagon officials got excited when secondary explosions from inside the caves continued for hours after the initial attacks.

Fuel-air explosives are also handy; an explosive aerosol can be injected into the entrance of a cave and then ignited. Anyone left inside will suffocate and be fried to a crisp.

... "We're going to figure out this cave business as we go along," says a former special-forces commando. In much the same way, they will figure out what to do if they catch up with bin Laden or another al-Qaeda leader.

In that event, the special forces would have to choose between a "snatch-and-grab" mission--tossing their target into a helicopter and getting out fast--or a "blow-and-go," in which case the captive would be killed.

Special forces "fast roping"
from a Pave Low helicopter

... All these plans assume that the leadership of al-Qaeda remains in Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence officials are convinced that bin Laden is indeed still there.

But sources tell TIME they are worried that other leaders of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban may have slipped out of the country, or be trying to. Their favored destinations are thought to be Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. (U.S. officials are also trying to check movements into Somalia, Chechnya and Sudan.)

... For now, however, the focus remains on Afghanistan. In the mountains and deserts, winter is approaching; with its onset, said Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British defense staff, "things will slow down a bit."

But only a bit.

The war may be won by small teams of dedicated warriors, but by most standards this is going to be a pretty big show. The Pentagon intends to send more troops to the region next week.

... The soldiers, brave and resourceful though they may be, will be able to do little to head off a looming humanitarian disaster.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest, most war-racked and drought-ridden places on earth. So far, humanitarian drops of food by U.S. planes have had little impact on the food shortage. ...

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Source:

• Time.com [link inactive]