Anthrax

Human Genome Sciences announced yesterday its first major contract with the U.S. government for an experimental anthrax drug, more than four years after the bacterial infection terrorized the country. But Wall Street's initial reaction was tepid. The federal government plans to purchase 20,000 doses of the Rockville biotech's treatment for $165.2 million, with delivery and 90 percent of the payment expected in 2008. When complete, the deal will give the 14-year-old company its first-ever product sales revenue.

An anthrax scare that targeted a state prosecutor's office, two Maryland courthouses and police stations in two other states ended yesterday when a federal judge sentenced the man responsible to 2 1/2 years in prison. Robert Darnell Finch, 35, of Baltimore admitted that he mailed several envelopes containing a white substance and letters describing the powder as anthrax. Exposure to anthrax spores can cause a deadly disease. None of the letters contained anthrax, but they triggered precautionary action by authorities.

Nobody could say how much - if any - anthrax might be clinging to the thousands of tabloid photos of Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor, Big Foot and who knows how many alien love-children. But the decontamination experts from Baltimore-based Marcor Remediation Inc. knew the spores had proved deadly for the Boca Raton, Fla., photo editor who kept watch over them until his death four years ago. So while most Americans were making holiday plans last month, the Marcor crew stepped into protective bio suits and entered the sealed basement parking garage beneath the abandoned former headquarters of such tabloid staples as the Star, the National Enquirer and Weekly World News.

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.

Bank-robberies term imposed A 21-year-old Baltimore man was sentenced to five years and three months in prison by a federal judge yesterday for robbing two banks on successive days in Baltimore County and stealing more than $3,700. James Hall pleaded guilty to robbing Provident Bank in the 11000 block of York Road in Hunt Valley on Dec. 7 and the First Mariner Bank in the 1700 block of York Road in Lutherville on Dec. 8. Hall was arrested Dec. 11 after being stopped on a traffic violation.

In College Park UM student, 21, hurt in shooting near apartment COLLEGE PARK -- A 21-year-old University of Maryland student was shot and wounded early Wednesday near a campus apartment, university police said. The student called police from one of the university's emergency phones outside one of the University Commons apartments near Susquehanna Hall. He told police he heard shots and was in pain, said Maj. Cathy Atwell. Police determined that he had been shot in the buttock, and he was taken to Prince George's Hospital Center, where he was reported in good condition.

An employee at the National Institutes of Health was arrested yesterday, accused of making an anthrax threat against an assessor's office in Florida with which she was having a property tax dispute, the FBI's Miami office said. Michelle Ledgister, 43, of Bethesda surrendered to federal agents on the parking lot of a Rockville strip mall near her work at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Special Agent Judy Orihuela, an FBI spokeswoman. After losing a claim for property tax relief on a home she owned in Parkland, Fla., Ledgister late last month left a voice mail message at the Broward County Property Appraiser's Office in Fort Lauderdale, her arrest warrant said.

Fire Lt. Randall Owens keeps one in the locker at his Rockville station and another in the master bathroom of his Frederick County home. His are two of the 7,000 "bio-packs" of anthrax antidotes given to 3,500 Montgomery County firefighters and police officers. First-responders are given two supplies of doxycycline or ciprofloxacin -- antibiotics used to treat anthrax infections --in clear pouches the size of fanny packs, to keep with them at home and work. In a push to control their own fate, Montgomery County, Baltimore City and other jurisdictions around the country are spending federal homeland security grant money to create stockpiles of antidotes that duplicate drugs readily available through the six-year-old Strategic National Stockpile program, which has cost more than $2 billion to assemble.

Scientists say a moist towel soaked with a common food preservative could turn into an effective tool for combating the next anthrax attack. Nisin, a compound found in hot dogs and other processed foods, has been shown to stop the spread of anthrax spores, and a Gaithersburg research firm is investigating its potential for preventing the spread of anthrax on human skin. Although the research is preliminary, if nisin works out, it would be the first topical treatment of its kind, according to researchers who presented findings at a scientific conference this week in Baltimore.

WASHINGTON - Despite spending billions on high-tech screening machines and elaborate plans to respond to biological terrorism, the federal government reacted with missteps and miscommunication in last week's Washington anthrax scare similar to what it showed in the 2001 attacks that killed five people. A laboratory hired by the military apparently mishandled a sample of suspected anthrax, while agencies that are supposed to be working together kept one another and their employees in the dark.