Overview

On October the 3rd 2001, Robert Stevens became the first fatal victim of bioterrorism in American, when, barely conscious, he entered a hospital emergency room with a fever and nausea. The medical staff had no idea what was making him sick, yet it was these doctors and the public health officials who solved the mystery - it was anthrax. Already shocked by the September 11 attacks, America panicked. Birthday cards, postcards and monthly bills were all regarded with suspicion and the US postal service became a deadly place to work. Yet behind the investigations of the police and the FBI, the medical and scientific detective work that is the frontline of any bioterrorism defence, was being carried out in hospitals and laboratories by incredibly dedicated and expert staff. Leonard A. Cole has personally interviewed every one of the surviving inhalation anthrax victims, along with relatives, friends and associates of those who died, in addition to public health officials, scientists, researchers, hospital workers and treating physicians. Speaking through their voices, The Anthrax Letters is a minute-by-minute account of the events, told by the very people that found themselves at the centre of the whirlwind. It is a testament to the untold and crucially important work of the scientists, doctors and researchers performing life-saving work under intense pressure and public scrutiny. It shows how the work of medical staff like these is any country's best chance in the event of a bioterrorist attack, and highlights just how vulnerable the world is to such warfare.

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9780309088817

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Carefully drawn chronology of the anthrax episodes of September and October 2001. They came and went at such speed and at such an overwhelming time that it is pardonable to remember the anthrax-bearing letters as a bad dream. But five people died from them, and this tight narrative of the events makes it clear that they were a mortal cog in the wheel that led to Homeland Security, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Bioterrorism expert Cole (Political Science/Rutgers Univ.; The Eleventh Plague, not reviewed, etc.) also makes it baldly clear that the letters' nasty cargo might easily have claimed many more lives if health professionals hadn't acted with admirable intuition and dispatch, rising to the occasion like latter-day Minutemen. Anthrax's reputation precedes it: a biblical plague, a hyper-amplifying bacterium that can blossom from a cluster of spores smaller than the eye of an ant into a gruesome blood sludge that kills or curses its victims. The author sketches vivid portraits of the bacteria, those who were infected, and those whose job it was to counter the threat and prepare the nation for biological attack. He describes the sparse and tentative information doctors had to work from, the difficulty of diagnosis, and the crucial roles played by the Centers for Disease Control, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. To give the story greater scope, Cole also touches upon the smallpox eradication campaign, the fight against biological weapons, the evolving first line of defense against chemical and biological attack, and the sorry history of anthrax hoaxes over the past decade. Despite the impressive containment work of health professionals, an unsettling story of all-too-accessible weapons. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Leonard A. Cole

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