The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America Read Free

owner of the Red Onion delicatessen, was ambivalent. “I might have seen him walking around here,” he told an FBI official. But perhaps Hatfill’s face seemed familiar, he acknowledged, because he had seen it on TV.
    In 2003, long after the discovery of anthrax in the Princeton mailbox, the FBI was still searching for the mailer and Hatfill was still considered a person of interest.
    Between October 4 and November 21, 2001, 22 people were diagnosed with anthrax. Eleven contracted the cutaneous form and all survived. But among the 11 who became ill from inhaling spores, five died. In subsequent months, with no new cases, national anxiety eased. But the discovery of the contaminated mailbox almost a year later in Princeton drew a torrent of television and newspaper coverage from around the world. Fear had been rekindled.
    Concern about anthrax is as old as the Bible. Primarily a disease of animals, it is thought to have been the fifth of the 10 biblical plagues visited by God on the ancient Egyptians for refusing freedom to the Jews. As recounted in Exodus, horses, donkeys, camels, cattle, and sheep were struck “with a very severe pestilence.”
    After their carcasses were burned, the virulence of the anthrax germs persisted, for the soot caused “boils on man and beast throughout the land of Egypt.”
    In recent years, anthrax spores have been deemed among the most likely of biological weapons because they are hardy, long lived, and, if inhaled, utterly destructive. A victim is unlikely to know he is under attack. As with other biological agents, anthrax germs are odorless and tasteless, and lethal quantities can be so tiny as to go unseen.
    Every 3 seconds or so, a human being inhales and exhales about a pint of air. Each cycle draws in oxygen to fuel the body and releases carbon dioxide, the gaseous waste product. The inhaled air commonly carries with it floating incidentals such as dust, bacteria, and other microscopic particles. If a particle is larger than 5 microns, it is likely to be blocked from reaching deep into the lungs by the respiratory tract’s mucus and filtration hairs. If smaller than 1 micron, a particle is too small to be retained and is blown out during exhalation. An anthrax spore may be 1 micron wide and 2 or 3 microns long, just the right size to reach deep into the respiratory pathway.
    A spore is so tiny that a cluster of thousands, which would be enough to kill someone, is scarcely visible to the naked eye. A thousand spores side by side would barely reach across the thin edge of a dime. Once inhaled, the spores are drawn into the bronchial tree where they travel through numerous branches deep in the lungs. Near the tips of the branches are microscopic sacs called alveoli. It is in these sacs that inhaled oxygen is exchanged with carbon dioxide.
    Stationed among the alveoli are armies of defender cells called macrophages. These cells sense foreign microinvaders and engulf them. A pulmonary macrophage normally destroys its inhaled captive and taxis it to the lymph nodes in the mediastinum, the area between the lungs. But in the case of anthrax, spores may transform into active, germinating organisms before the macrophage can affect them. The bacteria then can reproduce and release toxin that destroys the macrophage. Thus, in a perverse turnabout, the anthrax bacteria, like soldiers in the Trojan horse, can burst out of their encirclement, into the lymph and blood systems.
    An infected person at first is unaware that a gruesome cascade is under way. Although the onslaught is relentless, symptoms do not appear immediately. Fluids that have begun to accumulate in the mediastinum gradually pry the lungs apart. Breathing becomes increasingly difficult, and after a few days a person feels as if his head is being held underwater, permitted to bob up for a quick gulp of air and then pushed under again.
    The agony works its way through the body. Nausea gives way to violent, bloody vomiting. Joints are