ANTHRAX - In Florida attack is North American

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The bacteria used for the world's first successful anthrax attack belongs to a strain common in western North America.

The strain has killed one man, and infected at least two other people, at a newspaper office in Florida. The identity of the bacteria means whoever made the attack could have acquired it from a sick animal, a biological supply company or even a US veterinary school. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that the strain emerged from a foreign bioweapons lab.

Robert Stevens, a photo editor for the supermarket tabloid The Sun, died of pneumonic anthrax on Friday. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed on Wednesday that anthrax bacteria have been found in a 35-year-old woman who worked in the same building, as well as an older man detected earlier.

The bacteria that killed Stevens were found to be clinically the same as those infecting the male co-worker and found on Stevens's computer keyboard. Neither infected co-worker has developed anthrax symptoms. Landis Crockett, head of disease control at the Florida Department of Health, said on Wednesday that "there is a billion to one chance" that even two anthrax infections in the same building could have occurred naturally. A criminal investigation is underway.


Home grown?

On Wednesday the FBI said in Florida that the anthrax did not exactly match any of the reference strains from around the world to which it was compared. But it closely resembles the "Ames" strain of laboratory cultures, which was originally isolated from a cow in Iowa in 1932. It is also close to an Ames strain found circulating in the wild, which killed a goat in Texas in 1997.

"The Ames strain has never been found in the wild outside North America," says Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at the University of Louisiana at Baton Rouge who helped pioneer the geographic analysis of genetic variation in anthrax.

Earlier reports that the anthrax was "manmade", and that it resembled a family of strains that includes samples from Haiti, were wrong. But the Ames strain is a laboratory workhorse, and has been widely distributed to researchers and diagnostic labs all over the world.

This means the Florida bacteria could have come from a number of sources. "They could have got it off a dead cow this summer, or from a diagnostic or college lab," says Hugh-Jones. Anthrax spores are so hardy, that even stained specimens can be scraped off a slide used for teaching veterinary students, and cultured. Such specimens are poorly guarded.


Texan outbreak

The anthrax might also have come from a company that sells live bacteria to researchers. US companies have sold disease organisms only to licensed purchasers since 1997, but the Florida anthrax could have been bought before that. And other countries have few restrictions.

Anthrax collected in the wild varies in its ability to sicken humans. The Florida strain has killed only one of the three people it seems to have infected.

Last summer there were outbreaks of anthrax in bison, deer and cattle in western Canada and in South Dakota, Minnesota and Texas in the US. Animals that die of anthrax have vast numbers of bacteria in their blood, which could be easily collected.


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  Debora MacKenzie From New Scientist Online News 10:56   11  October  01

-- Anonymous, October 28, 2001

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