Anthrax

"In Cipro we trust" -- NBC anchor Tom Brokaw WASHINGTON -- As thousands of congressional aides and visitors were given nasal swab tests for anthrax last week after an envelope containing anthrax was opened in a Senate office, the attending Capitol physician announced, "If we screen you, we treat you." This means a course of the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin, commonly called, sought and today hoarded under the brand name Cipro. But thousands of doses of Cipro will lead to hundreds of serious and unnecessary harmful side effects.

Nobody does investigative journalism on TV like Public Television's "Frontline" -- nobody, and that includes "60 Minutes. " And Tuesday night at 9, the venerable series revisits Ft. Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, and the case of anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins who killed himself in 2008 as the FBI zeroed in on him as its prime suspect in the case of deadly envelopes of anthrax sent through the mail. According to this hard-edged report done in partnership with McClatchy Newspapers and Propublica, the FBI did more than zero in. Under tremendous pressure to solve the case that started in 2001 with anthrax mailed to U.S. senators and network anchors, the agency squeezed Ivins hard -- using every trick in the book to get a confession out of him even as he insisted on his innocence to the end. Ivins was a troubled guy with some distinctive kinks, the report acknowledges, but even FBI consultants in the case now admit that the agency overstated its evidence and never found a smoking gun to prove the researcher's guilt.

A measure requiring further federal investigation into the 2001 anthrax attack that killed five people was approved Thursday by the House of Representatives. It was proposed by two skeptics of a recently closed FBI probe that blamed the deadly attacks on Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist at the Army biodefense lab at Fort Detrick in Frederick. Maryland Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, who represents Frederick, and Democratic Rep. Rush Holt, from the New Jersey district where the anthrax letters were mailed, want the director of National Intelligence to investigate potential foreign connections to the attacks.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. of Rockville said Monday it won a five-year contract worth up to $1.25 billion to provide millions of doses of an anthrax vaccine for government stockpiles. The company said it would supply 44.75 million doses of BioThrax, the only vaccine licensed by the Food and Drug Administration to prevent anthrax infection. The company makes the vaccine at a facility in Michigan. Emergent is renovating a facility in Baltimore, where it plans to produce a tuberculosis vaccine, the company said.

Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the San Diego Union-Tribune, which was published Tuesday.THE Pentagon's decision to inoculate U.S. military personnel against highly lethal anthrax contamination is firmly supported by potential battlefield threats and sound medical science. Defense Secretary William Cohen should not abandon this necessary program because of the tiny minority of soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines who have refused to take the vaccine based on unsubstantiated claims about its safety.

Twenty years ago, Anthrax, along with Metallica and Megadeth, helped to introduce a sound that initially unnerved many but has since gained critical kudos for its musical inventiveness. Speed and thrash metal married the franticness of hardcore punk with the aggression of metal. The result was in some ways leaner and more intense. One of the things that made Anthrax so distinctive was its accessibility. There wasn't anything off-putting about the band's image: no strange, studded-leather costumes or over-the-top theatricality.

In case I ever turn up dead while being investigated by the Feds, and they release all the suspicious stuff they've uncovered about me, let me explain right now why I recently Googled "novel kill scientist poisoned strawberry." I was not trying to find a novel way to kill a scientist with a poisoned strawberry, OK? I was trying to remember a book I had read, in which several seemingly unrelated characters mysteriously start dying - including, I thought, a scientist who grew strawberries as a hobby, ate one and died - and it turned out they had all been involved in some secret scheme.

WASHINGTON -- Expressions of good old American macho are filling the air as the country, collectively and individually, decides how to deal with the threat of spreading anthrax infection and possible death from terrorism of whatever source. One view seems to hold that surely John Wayne, were he alive and a member of Congress, would not have fled the Capitol upon signs of the scary white powder delivered by mail to the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. The leaders of the House of Representatives who decided the better part of valor was to clear out while the place could be examined thoroughly were quickly labeled "wimps" by one New York tabloid newspaper.

NEW YORK - It has been five weeks since the last known death from anthrax, and that is good news for everyone, including, of course, Anthrax, the aging metal band from Bayside, Queens, that has become more famous for its moniker than its music. Slowly emerging from the Get What You Asked For file, Anthrax, whose members once reveled in how coolly evil the band sounded, has been humbled by its ironic association with terrorism, even as many of its older records have been selling at double their usual, albeit modest, pace - perhaps the first time that a biological attack has prompted a spike in heavy-metal album sales.

IT WAS during another day of all-anthrax, all-the-time TV coverage - I am seriously thinking of dropping my cable service, just to get away from CNN and all those scary crawls - when the report about biohazard suits came on. Apparently, some anxious citizens are now snapping up biohazard suits as fast as they snapped up oxygen masks when this anthrax scare first started. But, my God, what could life possibly be like in one of these suits? Could you actually open the mail wearing one of these babies?

This week the Smashing Pumpkins, Wale, Natalie Cole, Bryan Adams, Anthrax, and even Pauly Shore announced upcoming regional concerts. Wale, who's touring with new album "Ambition," has two area shows coming up: first, he'll open for Lupe Fiasco at Merriweather Post Pavilion on September 16. Tickets for that show, starting at $36, are already on sale. Then, he'll perform at Morgan State University on October 6 during the school's homecoming week. Rick Ross, Wiz Khalifa, Meek Mill, Big Sean, Savoy, Miami Horror, Kendrick Lamar, Dom Kennedy will appear with Wale on some dates of the tour, though the press release did not say which ones.

A measure requiring further federal investigation into the 2001 anthrax attack that killed five people was approved Thursday by the House of Representatives. It was proposed by two skeptics of a recently closed FBI probe that blamed the deadly attacks on Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist at the Army biodefense lab at Fort Detrick in Frederick. Maryland Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, who represents Frederick, and Democratic Rep. Rush Holt, from the New Jersey district where the anthrax letters were mailed, want the director of National Intelligence to investigate potential foreign connections to the attacks.

In the days, months and years after terrorist-driven planes hit the twin towers, fallout rained down on America the way chalky debris dusted Manhattan that September morning. Life would never be the same, we were told. And in some ways it wasn't. We learned to decipher the candy-colored terror alert chart. Lime meant safe. Cherry, big trouble. Signs over the Beltway reminded us to look at one another with suspicion. We scrutinized our mail for anything powdery and white. BWI Airport not only scrambled to tighten security like every airport in the country, national leaders tagged it to be a safety leader.

A Maryland maker of anthrax vaccine said Friday that it has bought a 55,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in East Baltimore that it will use to expand its operations, potentially creating as many as 125 jobs in the city over the next five years that initially were expected in Frederick. Emergent BioSolutions Inc., a 600-person bio-pharmaceutical company with headquarters in Rockville, bought the East Baltimore facility for $7.85 million from the MdBio Foundation, a charitable and educational foundation that supports the state's bioscience industry.

The biodefense lab at Fort Detrick in Frederick began a thorough search of its freezers yesterday to ensure that it has an accurate inventory of the deadly bacteria, viruses and toxins accumulated there over a period of 40 years, Defense Department officials said. Col. John P. Skvorak, commander of the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases, ordered a "stand-down," or pause in ordinary operations, and a complete inventory last week after 20 vials of "biological select agents and toxin" (BSAT)

WASHINGTON - Amid continuing questions from some lawmakers and others about the FBI's investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, the FBI is asking the National Academy of Sciences to review its probe, Director Robert S. Mueller III said yesterday. Among the issues that the independent organization likely would examine is how FBI analysts traced anthrax powder that was mailed to two U.S. senators and several news organizations to the Fort Detrick laboratory of Bruce E. Ivins, who killed himself in July.

WASHINGTON -- Dr. Steven Hatfill may or may not be the killer who sent anthrax through the mail last year. But something smells about the way the FBI is handling this matter. Without arresting him, a researcher who never worked with anthrax, and even without calling him a suspect -- merely one of 20 or 30 "people of interest" -- the FBI apparently tipped off the press when it made a scheduled search of Dr. Hatfill's apartment. When the FBI agents arrived, they were accompanied by satellite trucks and news helicopters buzzing overhead.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Postal Service is belatedly delivering thousands of insider-trade reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, paper filings delayed when anthrax contaminated Washington's postal center three months ago. The reports of executive stock transactions from October through early December are just now arriving at the SEC, where they are studied by investors as a sign of how company insiders view the strength of their companies' stock....

FREDERICK - Six weeks after Bruce E. Ivins killed himself, the cremated remains of Ivins, the Army scientist and anthrax suspect, are stored at a funeral home here, awaiting the outcome of an unusual probate court proceeding. In a will he wrote last year, a few months before the FBI focused the anthrax letters investigation on him, Ivins wrote of his wish to be cremated and have his ashes scattered. But fearing that his wife, Diane, and their two children might not honor the request, he came up with a novel way to enforce his demand: threatening to make a bequest to an organization he knew his wife opposed, Planned Parenthood.