Whilst it is generally advised to keep the speedos on in public, there are occasions where it might be appropriate whip them off. Say jelly wrestling in a frat house or a visit to the Mardi Gras, the loose-limbed celebration in New Orleans which attracts all sorts of folks looking for fun and games and where exposure of a boob or two barely gathers comment. Ditto the great Carnivals in Brazil. Or say a medical emergency, like a suspected anthrax attack, like the ones in the US in the late 90s where car parks were quickly repurposed as public places for the fire department to hose down anyone suspected of running hot.
Now if anthrax sounds particularly nasty, it is. Maybe it’s the sinister x at the end, or maybe it’s because you don’t know what it is. You’re not alone. Anthrax is an infection, caused when the bacterium bacillis anthracis, a nasty gram-positive and rod-shaped bacterium, comes into contact with skin, is inhaled, or absorbed through the gut. Cue one ignorant evening surfing Netflix, blissfully unaware, before the symptoms start to show up. On the skin small blisters will form, swelling follows suit, before it all goes black. Nasty. If inhaled, the chest will tighten up and there’ll be shortness of breath. So much like a blind date. If absorbed through the intestine, unfortunately a proper dose of the trots will ensue. With side serving of nausea and prodigious vomiting. Nasty indeed.
The spores are often spread through animal products; indeed, one of the last fatal cases recorded in the US was in 1976 when a softly spoken home weaver eagerly opened up a box of wool from Pakistan, keen to crack on with a few cardigans for the grand-children and ended in a zip-up body bag in a sealed metal container. In the UK the most recent case is even more recent. 2009 saw an outbreak among heroin addicts in some of Glasgow’s less appealing properties, an outbreak which tragically saw the need for fourteen body bags. Police suspected that the heroin was to blame, and that the Bacillis anthracis had been somehow mixed in with bone meal of all things in the stuffy parlours of Afghanistan where, one assumes, health and safety regulations are yet to hamper the industrial scale production of narcotics.
It was the German physician Robert Koch who first identified the bacterium that caused anthrax. Now Koch was a proper scientist, a pioneer, a leading light and is widely regarded as one of the main founders of modern bacteriology. He used his discovery of the bacillis anthacis and others to prove that germs could cause a specific disease. His life’s work would go on to shape public health policy, inform standards of hygiene and save millions and millions of lives as a result. His beard alone deserved a prize of some sorts, but his Nobel Prize in 1905 was for his professional efforts. The other ‘father’ of modern bacteriology was of course, the great Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and microbiologist who first discovered the principles for vaccination, microbial fermentation and, of course, pasteurisation. He too would save countless lives through the development of vaccines for rabies and indeed, anthrax.
Now where anthrax gets properly nasty, insofar as one can play it safe by not ordering wool from Pakistan or sourcing one’s ‘gear’ from the Tora Bora, is when it is used deliberately. Yes, you read right, there are some people who live with us on planet earth, who sit at their workstations after lunch and struggle too, to keep their eyes open; these people think that adding a few anthrax spores to a weapon, like a missile, is fair game. Thereby giving it a big up yours to everyone who errs with the Geneva Convention in matters of cross border scuffles, anarchy and revolution.
Anthrax spores were first used in Norway of all places, when some up-for-it locals supposedly popped some pores in the faces of the bull-rushing Imperial Russian army. KAPOW and all that. The results were not recorded, which is perhaps best. That was in 1916. By the 1930s the Japanese were thinking along the same lines and testing the merits of injecting prisoners of war to see what happened. Well, they died. Lots of them. Before getting all high-and-mighty and pacing the sitting room clutching a rolled-up copy of this week’s Country Life, muttering about the cruelty of such a regime, the British too have form. Yes, the British: a land of pomp, ceremony, and sticky toffee puddings. In 1942, trials of bioweapons severely contaminated Gruinard Island, a small island of the West Coast of Scotland loved by many a migrating bird, rendering it completely uninhabitable. Around the same time, someone was cooking up about five million cattle cakes. Yes, cattle cakes. These were feed pellets infused with anthrax spores that the Royal Airforce planned to drop over Germany for local speaking herds of unsuspecting Frisians. I know, one would have thought that the cows could have been left out of it, but no. In war, the cows too are fair game. Fortunately, the cattle cakes were never used and by the 1970s most law-abiding countries had agreed to get rid of any remaining stockpiles of anthrax.
That didn’t stop the spores being used for terror. In 2001, in what became known as Amerithrax – a clever blending of America and anthrax by a junior intern at the FBI – five people died after opening a letter they might have thought was a missive from a lover, or a utility bill or perhaps even, a parking fine. It turned out, even a court summons for tax evasion would have been better than the deadly dose of anthrax spores that were contained in the envelope. What followed was what is still talked about in the FBI canteen as one of the largest and most complex investigations in the Bureau’s history. After lots of wire tapping and digging through bins, the investigators’ gaze fell on one Steven Hatfill, a well-known bio-weapons expert. Despite his house being raided on several occasions it turned out that Steven was indeed just a law-abiding bio-weapons expert. Having one’s eyes too close together, does not make a man guilty. Back to the drawing board for the top team. Months later, attention turned to Bruce Ivans, a scientist at the government’s own biodefense labs at Fort Derick. He was put under surveillance and followed home from Tex-Mex Chicken every night. The FBI were convinced they had their man, but they would not see their day in court. Ivans, having spotted the black sedan in his rear-view mirror one too many times, panicked and overdosed on some Panadol. Despite the FBI team being convinced, no formal charges were ever filed, though, and no direct evidence of his involvement has been uncovered. Hmm. That the attacks came a week after the World Trade Centre collapsed, meant that there was likely a lot of adrenalin coursing through the FBI. Context matters.
So that’s anthrax. For any ramblers with a penchant for the Siberian tundra, just mind your eye. Russian scientists think that there are about 1.5m anthrax infected reindeer corpses staring up glassy eyed in the permafrost. Should global warming continue apace as per the Guardian’s shrill warnings, these carcasses could come into play.
Maybe stick to the Brecon Beacons.
Hepburnsays 