Correspondence
Correspondence OUR SURPRISING TIMES ONE THING IS FOR SURE: We live in surprising times. The "Surprisingly Good Guys List" in the Oct. 22 Scrapbook moved me to submit a bit entitled "A Good...
...11, I have seen him over and over again in New York City...
...As a postscript, a surprise that maybe no one should have been shocked at: Rev...
...NATHANIEL TRELEASE Cheyenne, WY GETTING MORE SERIOUS TO CONTINUE IN THE SPIRIT of David Tell's "All About Anthrax" (Oct...
...Does no one teach them the basics...
...That's the good surprise...
...The times we live in are too perilous for scientific ignoramuses to be controlling our future, not that the scientifically cognizant would be good politicians, sad to say...
...Even if it complicates the daily work of the State Department, we need to be constantly reminded that there are real and substantial forces in the world that actively work for our harm and even destruction...
...JON LAAN Atlanta, GA AS CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL hints, in the aftermath of Sept...
...What is no surprise is that British prime minister Tony Blair closed ranks with us just as we closed ranks with Winston Churchill...
...DON HEWITT Executive Producer, 60 Minutes New York, NY LET'S GET SERIOUS CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL's piece "Be Afraid" (Oct...
...But since Sept...
...RICHARD H. EBRIGHT Waksman Institute of Microbiology Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ...
...29), I believe we can expect future bioterror attacks will employ multi-drug-resistant bacillus anthracis strains...
...That attitude leads to politics that are not serious and allows our enemies to find comfort and gather strength...
...The question is whether we have retained the intellectual and moral fiber necessary to rebuild our politics...
...11 we need to develop a mature, serious politics...
...Coming home from London after living there for a good part of 1943 and 1944 as a war correspondent, I was firmly convinced that the Londoner who lived through the blitz, shaking his fist at the Luftwaffe overhead and ducking the V-1 and the V-2 pilotless bombers that all but decimated his city, was a breed of man the world would never see again...
...11 will answer...
...Most Americans do not know the difference between a virus and a bacterium, so doctors write useless antibiotic prescriptions for viral illnesses...
...As a scientist, I continue to be appalled at the ignorance of politicians who deal with scientific matters...
...A penicillin-resistant, tetracycline-resistant derivative of the b. anthracis Ames strain could be constructed from the Ames strain in one week, using materials available in many molecular biology laboratories and procedures taught in many upper-level molecular biology undergraduate programs and in most first-year molecular biology graduate programs...
...22 Scrapbook moved me to submit a bit entitled "A Good Surprise, A Bad Surprise, and No Surprise...
...In the absence of widespread vaccination against anthrax, the results of even crude dispersal of such strains would be devastating...
...I would recommend that the U.S...
...In short, any person or organization able to prepare and distribute b. anthracis as a terror weapon (and, alas, at least one such person or organization exists) could be able to prepare and distribute a multi-drug-resistant, effectively untreatable, version of this bacteria...
...At the very least, parading through those streets today could have been storm troopers, not protesters...
...The bad surprise is that the children and grandchildren of those wartime Londoners paraded through London's streets protesting America's bombing of the Taliban...
...Jerry Falwell's contention that God sent Osama bin Laden to cleanse our souls...
...But when people cavil and scoff at this idea, Sept...
...Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson's telling us early on that the first case of anthrax was from a man's drinking water out of a stream in North Carolina is a sad example...
...Watching them with their dopey signs, all I could think of was that, if it weren't for the American B-17s that did to Hitler what we now want to do to Osama bin Laden, there might well have been no streets of London for them to parade through...
...A penicillin-resistant, tetracy-cline-resistant, ciprofloxacin-resistant derivative of the b. anthracis Ames strain could be constructed with somewhat more difficulty...
...I believe the only effective way to avoid continued disruption and terror—and perhaps future mass destruction—is widespread vaccination...
...When the federal government either conceals or refuses to fully disclose the scope and magnitude of the threats we face, it fosters the growth of all manner of fantastical notions, including the conceit that peace is the normal condition of mankind or, worse yet, the temporal fallacy that our society has banished war and hate...
...29) is full of great insights...
...When the government conceals the nature of the threats before us, hope diminishes...
...government: (a) award additional contracts for production of the approved human anthrax vaccine (voiding the sole-source contract to Bioport), (b) clear existing civilian stocks of human anthrax vaccine for distribution (bypassing FDA approval processes and restrictions that have prevented release of the vaccine produced by Bioport), (c) evaluate possible use of the non-encapsulated live culture anthrax vaccine (Sterne/veterinary or STI/human), and (d) initiate voluntary vaccination of civilians...
Vol. 7 • November 2001 • No. 9
