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Consider the federal investigators who have “formally concluded” their investigation into the 2001 anthrax killings, pointing again to the late anthrax vaccine researcher Bruce Ivins as the case’s culprit.

Whatever history’s verdict on Ivins, one brouhaha at the center of the case has already outlived him — the story of “weaponized” anthrax.

“One of my biggest frustrations with this has been showing people the data, and it doesn’t matter,” says researcher Joseph Michael of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M. Michael has presented electron microscope results that show the 2001 attack anthrax wasn’t weaponized for two years, “but still the idea refuses to go away.”

The notion took hold in October of 2001, as the Hart senate office building faced closure due to anthrax contamination, when then-House minority leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., described some of the anthrax used in the attacks as “weapons-grade material.” The claim sparked a flurry of reports about the peculiar properties of the attack spores, their high quality and lightness, which hastened their spread through the building’s ventilation system.

Fears centered around silica, the chief ingredient in sand, which allows small bacterial spores to float more freely in the air, or aerosolize, if applied as a coating, a Cold War bioweapons technique studied at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.

In particular, a 2001 warning that silica had been purposely added to the attack anthrax came from virologist Peter Jahrling of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The warning was delivered to White House officials (reported in Robert Preston‘s 2002 book, The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story), after U.S. Armed Forces Institutes of Pathology X-ray results showed silica present in samples of the attack anthrax. The fear gained currency in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war‘s beginning, which centered around fears of bioweapons, as well as chemical and nuclear weapons.

“The spores in the Washington, D.C. letters were of exceptional purity,” says the Justice Department’s just-released investigation summary.

So, as part of the investigation, Michael and his colleagues looked at the attack spores using electron microscopes, which can see at fine enough resolution, on the nanometer scale, to spot exactly where the silica resided.In so doing they knocked down the notion the attack anthrax had been weaponized with a silicon coating. Instead, they found silicon that occurred naturally inside the spores.

“I believe I made an honest mistake,” Jahrling told The Los Angeles Times, in a 2008 response to this news, adding he was “overly impressed” by his initial views of the attack spores under the microscope.

Still the idea lives on, for example, in a January opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, that cited scientists who see the amount of silica in the attack spores as “blowing the FBI‘s case out of the water.” (The FBI argued the lab where Ivins worked didn’t have the facilities to weaponize the anthrax.)

Michael calls it “remarkable” that the opinion piece didn’t note his team’s well-publicized findings. “As a sheltered scientist, it kind of shocks me,” Michael says. “People will believe what they want to believe.”

So, how did the silica get inside the spores then? A January Journal of Bacteriology study led by Ryuichi Hirota of Japan’s Hiroshima University offers one answer. Looking at Bacillus cereus, a bacterium closely related to anthrax, researchers find silica naturally ingest the stuff if grown in sand-laced Petri dishes. Further, the silica produces acid resistance in the bugs, something they need to survive a trip to the stomach of grazing animals, one way they spread in the wild.

But it doesn’t make the spores float any more easily, Hirota and colleagues find. FBI scientist Vahid Majidi in 2008 suggested the crushing the anthrax letters underwent in postal sorting machines likely contributed to the fineness of the powders released in the Senate office building.

“I have to wonder if the controversial (Wall Street Journal opinion) piece didn’t put pressure on the Department of Justice and FBI to close the case. Maybe they realized that continuing the case just encouraged such misinformation,” says anthrax scientist Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, who managed the investigation’s repository of 1,070 anthrax samples. “Everyone can judge for themselves how the investigation was handled and the strength of the conclusions. Not everyone will be happy with the FBI conclusions, but this is America and we revel in conspiracy theories.”

Source: USA Today

The Postal Service is ready to deliver lifesaving drugs to about a quarter of the residents of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the only metropolitan area in the nation where letter carriers have been trained to dispense medication after a large-scale terrorist attack involving biological weapons.

Six years after the government began exploring the idea of using postal workers as rapid-response medicine dispensers and eight months after President Obama ordered government agencies to develop a plan to do so, efforts are underway in six cities to train workers to deliver the drugs needed to counter anthrax or other potentially deadly agents, the White House says.

The White House won’t name the six cities, and Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa says she can’t talk about whether more cities are interested in the voluntary program.

Cities are not required to adopt the plan, and most have separate plans in place to set up distribution centers in schools, community health centers and other government buildings where people can go to pick up drugs in the event of an attack. The White House, however, says using the Postal Service is a cost-effective and efficient way to create a reliable system for drug distribution in a crisis because postal workers can get drugs to the elderly and others who can’t get out easily or wait in long lines.

“We need the capability” to get lifesaving drugs to people in a hurry because in the case of an anthrax attack, in particular, “what we know is: hours matter,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro says.

He says “many cities have expressed interest” in the program, especially now that there is a successful model to follow in Minneapolis.

The nation’s capital is among them. “We’re still looking at it,” says Dena Iverson of the District of Columbia Department of Health.

The projected cost to set up the program and train postal workers: $1 million per city, according to the White House.

In 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a series of small-scale anthrax attacks killed five people. Victims can be saved, however, if they begin taking antibiotics soon after they’ve been exposed.

“It doesn’t make any difference if we make all these new antibiotics and vaccines if we don’t have ways to get them to people,” says Randall Larsen of the WMD Center, a think tank that focuses on bioterrorism.

The idea of having letter carriers deliver drugs to people in their homes has been discussed since 2004.

Since then:

•In 2006 and 2007, test runs were done in Seattle, Philadelphia and Boston.

•In 2008, the Bush administration issued an emergency order allowing the Food and Drug Administration to approve advance distribution of antibiotics to letter carriers who volunteer for the program and their families so that they would be protected from exposure to anything they encounter on their rounds.

•In December 2009, Obama issued an executive order to jump-start the process. It gave federal agencies 180 days to develop a Postal Service model that could be replicated around the country. It also required the government to meet a demand from the Postal Service: that workers delivering the drugs be accompanied by law enforcement officers to protect them from panicked and potentially violent crowds.

Now, “we’re fine if they (terrorists) attack Minneapolis,” says James Talent, former vice chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. The Postal Service has “proven they can do it.”

With a model in place, the White House says it is working to expand the voluntary program to cities across the country.

Natalie Grant director of Boston’s Office of Public Health Preparedness says the city is awaiting instruction from the federal government about how to proceed.

Minneapolis postal worker Chris Wittenburg of the National Association of Letter Carriers says setting up the program is complicated. First, letter carriers have to volunteer, undergo medical tests to make sure they can take the antibiotics, be fitted for masks (no facial hair allowed) and be trained. Routes have to be combined, and systems set up to suspend regular mail delivery in an instant, call postal workers in and send them out carrying boxes of drugs and fliers telling people what to do.

About 60% of the city’s letter carriers volunteered for the program, which was given a trial run in May.

Workers there can now deliver drugs to 205,000 households, or 575,000 people, within eight hours. Officials plan to expand the program to reach all 735,000 households in the metro area.

The need to get drugs or other antidotes to people fast is a “unique situation,” Wittenburg says, “and the Postal Service is really the only organization with the capability to pull it off.”

Source: USA Today