Anthrax attack -- or panic attack?

As suspected bioterror incidents are reported from Oregon to New York, medical experts fear the nation is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

By Arthur Allen

Oct 13, 2001 | One of pediatrician Al Mehl's patients in Boulder, Color., today was a young boy with a chest cold. The illness was routine, but his mother's take on it was anything but. "Tell me it isn't anthrax," she begged Mehl. "Tell me it isn't anthrax."

Around the same time, a suspicious powder on the roadway led police to close the main highway through Lake Oswego, a wealthy suburb of Portland, Ore., for three hours. The powder turned out to be wheat flour, dropped to mark a path for a jogging club.

In suburban Washington, D.C., police and local news teams rushed to an Episcopalian church, scene of the following emergency: A secretary had felt a "tingling of the mouth" after opening a dusty envelope.

Are we a nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown? In the brutal shadow of 9/11, in the peculiar wake of the still-mysterious Florida and New York anthrax cases, powders are giving people jitters coast to coast. Health departments, clinics and emergency rooms are swamped with calls from the worried well; scores of buildings have been evacuated, and some employees quarantined, by fear of unknown powders.

Historically, many mass psychosomatic disease outbreaks have occurred in closed social groups under pressure -- among Tokyo subway riders, for example, or teenage girls in the hothouse of junior high.

"We're all in the hothouse now," says Dr. Timothy Jones, an epidemiologist at the Tennessee Department of Health.

Seven or eight Internet medicine-peddling sites have even added ciprofloxacin -- the antibiotic of choice for inhalation anthrax -- to their wares.

"Cipro and Viagra -- that kind of blew me away," said Dr. Michael Fleming, a family practitioner in Shreveport, La. Fleming has already talked down two patients -- one with a cough, the other with a small rash -- who were convinced they had anthrax.

Wars have a way of spreading psychosomatic illnesses among the hometown crowd. In 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, 29 people in Mattoon, Ill., by ones and twos, began to fall faint, to vomit and grow dizzy. Some said they'd been sprayed with a sweet-smelling gas by a man hiding in the bushes. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon, the tabloids called him. During the Gulf War, 17 Rhode Island teenagers and teachers became ill after an imaginary toxic gas release.

Next Page: For every real case there will be a hundred imaginary ones

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