Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
And this is only anthrax. If the terrorists infected us with smallpox, for instance, the supply packages wouldn't be worth their postage. Unlike anthrax, smallpox is extremely contagious, and no antiviral agents have proven effective in treating it. By the time it was spotted -- presumably after the 12- to 14-day incubation period -- it would likely be everywhere. Historically, health officials have assumed that an infected person will infect roughly 15 others per day, until he or she has been isolated. If just two terrorists gave themselves smallpox and spent a day in, say, LaGuardia airport, 450 travelers could have smallpox by dinner time. Five days later, by this formula, almost 350 million could have it. And it would still be another week before anyone knew.
Even a clinical description of smallpox is painful to read. According to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies,
After the incubation period, the patient experiences high fever, malaise, and prostration with headache and backache. Severe abdominal pain and delirium are sometimes present. A mascopapular rash then appears, first on the mucosa of the mouth and pharynx, face and forearms, spreading to the trunk and legs. Within one or two days, the rash becomes vesicular and later pustular. The pustules are characteristically round, tense and deeply embedded in the dermis; crusts begin to form about the eighth or ninth day. When the scabs separate, pigment-free skin remains, and eventually pitted scars form.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The media has focused recently on two indices of panic: the leading anthrax antibiotic and gas masks. Not long after last month's attacks, word spread that the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin -- also a fairly common treatment for urinary tract infections -- was already impossible to find, and that obtaining even a cheap gas mask suddenly meant spending hundreds on eBay.
The official response, in turn, has been bizarre and convoluted. In the "60 Minutes" interview, Thompson called gas masks unnecessary, adding: "How would you be able to utilize it? Are you going to have a gas mask with you 24 hours a day?"
Thompson stumbled here into a strange new logic that has emerged in recent conversations about bio-terror. Rather than explain why we shouldn't panic, we explain that panicking isn't useful. Ask people why they're not worried and they give the same shrugging reply: "Worrying doesn't help." This is Tommy Thompson logic. Worrying may not help, but what does that have to do with anything, and when did we become so pragmatic?
Is the truth nothing more than a collective failure of imagination? Are we incapable of picturing hundreds of citizens suffering an agonizing death in our own streets? We continue to employ lightning storm reasoning here: If the bolts have your number, they have your number. But germ warfare introduces a radical new element to the existential calculus of weighing risks: instead of lightning's quick death, we'd suffer prolonged, excruciating, disfiguring pain. Is it still meaningful to say worrying doesn't help?
Listen to the professional calmers, and at the heart of their reassurance you'll hear the same rhetorical omission over and over: Everyone says a ninth-grade biology student could make anthrax in his bathtub, they say, but it's not that easy. Well, we didn't ask about ninth-grade biology students. We're interested in what a wealthy, organized and well-connected terrorist is capable of.
As to how to combat such a threat, our options are disturbingly limited. Prevention is possible, desirable and, according to many experts, extremely undependable, if not downright impossible. Relying on quickly getting an antidote to the infected is rife with logistical problems. And, given the incubation period -- we could all have anthrax, smallpox, botulism, tularemia or the plague right now, actually -- any decision to flee presupposes that a biological attack hasn't already happened; hardly airtight reasoning if we've already accepted the premise that attack is imminent.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has commented on the media's reluctance to pick up the biowarfare story until recently. He recalls a startling opinion piece in the Washington Post written in 1999 by then-Defense Secretary William Cohen. "In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical or biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be hoaxes," Cohen wrote. "Someday, one will be real."
"I watched carefully to see if anyone followed up on this," Gelb told the New Yorker recently. "But none of the television networks and none of the elite press even mentioned it ... I was astonished."
Now, nearly a year into the 21st century, America has begun an overhaul of its imaginative capabilities, much as plague-era Europe had to do six centuries ago. The sphere of conceivable terror now extends beyond shark attacks and occasional stray bullets. We go to baseball games, airports and subway stations with a vast and awful new narrative in our heads. Dimly, we can picture the chain of failed intelligence, the harmless-looking cooler at the football game, the cough after breakfast two weeks later, the frantic phone calls, the blocked roads, the clutching at the chest and finally a few lurching steps stumbled down the block.
Much has been said about the new American landscape, or at least our new lens. We grab around for a way to understand what's happening, and surely someone will eventually write a book about how this period was our Judgment Day: Suddenly, after all, we find ourselves facing an uncertain fate, at the hands of a mysterious and wrathful entity. As we wait for something terrible, we look around us for a glimpse of where we went wrong, of which sins couldn't be forgiven. Was it McDonald's? All those terrible movies? Greed? Was it the way we sometimes lose sight of what's meaningful? Or did we just send too many women to college?
We wait. We wait for our government to announce victory, or for medicine to catch up with evil, or for the first scratches of a cough in the back of the throat. Gas masks and tickets to Alaska -- these feel neither realistic nor effectual. Long ago, someone fired a bullet in the air -- the advent of biological weapons -- and now we must shuffle around nervously wondering where it will land.
