The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America Read Online Free Page A

Bush went next door to the emergency department, where Bob Stevens lay unconscious. He introduced himself to Maureen, quizzed her briefly about what Bob had been doing the past few days, and examined him. He saw no skin lesions or indications of trauma and felt no swollen glands. Through the stethoscope he heard a crackling sound when Bob breathed, caused perhaps by an obstruction. It was clear that Bob was very ill, but why? Bush returned to the lab, looked again at the microscopic rods, and played out some thoughts:
    The organism was a bacillus, as evident by its Gram stain and its shape. There are many types of bacilli, but very few cause significant disease. Also, bacilli can appear in some blood samples as contaminants. But if you see bacteria in a normally sterile area like spinal fluid, you have to think of it as an infection, not a contaminant.
    So what I saw was obviously a bacillus in the spinal fluid. When you think of the common bacilli that can cause somebody to be ill, there is one called Bacillus cereus, which you can see with traumatized patients or with immuno-compromised patients. Another is Bacillus subtilis , which, again, we occasionally see in the bloodstream. I’ve never seen it in the spinal fluid. So my thought was that, although this could be a couple of these or some other bacilli, usually people who have them have a reason to have them. This patient had no reason to have any bacillus as far as exposures or trauma were concerned. He had not been an ill person and he had no immune system defects.
     
    Larry Bush, like other physicians, indeed like much of America, had been hearing a lot about biological weapons in recent years. National concern heightened in the 1990s with suspicions that Iraq still had a biological warfare program despite its agreement after the Persian Gulf War to end it. Equally shocking was news about the size of the former Soviet program. In violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, a treaty that bans these weapons, around 60,000 Soviet scientists and technicians had produced tons of anthrax, smallpox, and plague germs. Although the program ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet scientists were subsequently courted by Iran and perhaps Syria, Libya, and other countries deemed unsavory by the American government.
    Besides bioagents as military weapons of war, biological terrorism has become more worrisome. The 1995 release of sarin in the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult was particularly alarming. In that case the weapon was a chemical nerve agent that killed 12 people and injured more than a thousand. But the attack suggested that the same, or worse, could be done with a biological agent. So by the beginning of the 21st century, bioweapons were understood to be a growing threat. Then came September 11. After the jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, terrorism became the subject overshadowing all other issues. Residents of South Florida were acutely aware that several of the suicide hijackers had lived among them and taken flying lessons nearby. Anxiety there as elsewhere was about further hijackings and other forms of terror, though the possibility of bioterrorism received no special attention.
    For Larry Bush on October 2, the bioconnection was immediate. He turned to the woman who had prepared the Stevens specimens: “Kandy, did you see his cerebrospinal fluid? Did you look at that Gram stain?” Kandy Thompson, a medical technologist since 1975, had worked at JFK for 6 years. She had previously run a microbiology laboratory at another hospital, and Bush knew she could offer an experienced impression. She looked again through the microscope and said: “The spinal fluid looks milky, pussy, bloody. I don’t know—large rods, a bacillus, maybe clostridium.” Neither she, the emergency room doctors, nor anyone else who had attended Robert Stevens imagined the kind of thought that had leaped to Larry Bush’s