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SMALLPOX???
alledan
Member Posts: 19,541
Smallpox -- The next threat?By Wolf BlitzerCNN Wolf Blitzer Reports WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The anthrax investigations have spread from Florida to New York to Nevada and now to Washington D.C. and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's Capitol Hill office. Clearly, this is very troubling. But as several experts have pointed out to me in recent days, anthrax -- while potentially deadly -- can be contained by U.S. health authorities. What is clearly much more worrisome to these experts is another deadly biological agent -- namely smallpox. Here's what the Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, told me on Sunday: "I don't believe you should be that worried about anthrax because it's very difficult to spread, to move around." He noted that's the widespread assessment of physicians and other infectious disease specialists. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, agrees with Shelby. "I'm most concerned about the biological threat, including the threat of smallpox. I think that's the one that perhaps keeps me up nights more than anything else." Why is smallpox so much more of a potential threat than anthrax? I put that question to Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota and one of the world's leading authorities on bio-terrorism. Together with John Schwartz of The New York Times, Dr. Osterholm last year wrote an excellent book entitled "Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe." (Delacorte Press 2000) I strongly recommend this concise but important book. "Smallpox, the nightmare to end all nightmares that was eliminated as a natural disease in the 1970s, often starts with a simple fever -- the sort of thing anyone might get," Dr. Osterholm writes in the book. After a relatively long incubation period, it gets worse. When I interviewed him Sunday, he pointed out that smallpox does kill about 30 percent of the people that contract it. In the United States today, he said, mostly everyone would be susceptible to smallpox since few people have received vaccinations since the 1970s. If you did receive a vaccination 30 years ago, it probably is no longer effective. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says: "Routine vaccination against smallpox ended in 1972. The level of immunity, if any, among persons who were vaccinated before 1972 is uncertain; therefore, these persons are assumed to be susceptible." The CDC has an informative site on small pox. Just click here, to view it. Unlike anthrax, smallpox can be transmitted by people who have contracted it. "So instead of having that first event be the end of it, like it is with anthrax where no one who becomes infected transmits this on, smallpox could be transmitted on," Dr. Osterholm told me. Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, a former law enforcement official who participated in the "Dark Winter" war game on bio-terrorism, is also an authority on the subject. He told me local and state health officials quickly need lots more training to deal with the threat of smallpox. He says the supply of vaccine needs to be increased right away. "Don't let an individual in Washington say that doctors and nurses, for example, in Atlanta can't have them, they have to go some place else," Keating says. "We have to have a decision-making mechanism that's prompt." Let's hope the threat of smallpox remains simply that -- a threat.
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Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem.Semper Fidelis
When you want to dial long distance...AT&T, .223, or Jeremiah 33.3?
When you want to dial long distance...AT&T, .223, or Jeremiah 33.3?
I judge Thee!, Not for what you are , but for what you say !