Wow, was just watching cnn. They had a press conference about a guy in Florida who has Anthrax. They say there are no other reported cases and that it is not contagious. I haven't found any online links but there was jsut a press conference at the white house. Scary...
I thought they had vaccines for it? And I can't find any information on it from the websites nor the news.
The vaccines, I believe, are long-term processes. If you were to start getting immunized for anthrax today, you have to take something like 6-8 shots over the course of the next 18 months. That's the vaccine for something. I think it's anthrax, but I'm not sure.
If they catch it early enough they can vaccinate for it but it does damage fairly fast if i'm not mistaken. On the Cable News Networks right now The Press Secratary has confirmed that it is an isolated incident.
First off, anthrax is not contagious at all. It's a spore, not a virus or anything like that, and is not self-replicating or mobile in the sense that they are. Unless you get directly hit by the spores or walk into a spore-infested area, you're safe. All vaccinations are pretty much the same. A vaccination is a dose of a weak strain of the agent you're trying to defend against. An anthrax vaccine is, literally, anthrax, just a very weak strain that won't kill you (well, 99.9% of the time it won't) - it just makes you sick for a while, and teaches your body how to fight anthrax in the future. But unless anyone here has been in the military within the past couple decades, you haven't gotten an anthrax vaccination, as they're about the only ones who dispense them. If this were an attack we'd see more than one case. And with anthrax, if a certain city's hospitals started to each see several anthrax cases at once, then we'd know that we'd been hit about a week earlier (it's about a week before the really bad symptoms start showing up). It's highly treatable, given you get medical attention quickly -and the doctors actually recognize it for what it is, and don't just send you home thinking you have the flu...
That is true sometimes but not always. There are several types of vaccines. One is a live, attuenated virus which means a weak strain like you described. These are the most dangerous of vaccines but still very safe. Then there are vaccines used with dead viruses. I belive this is the type of vaccine the smallpox vaccine is but I am not sure. The safest of all is a vaccine made with portions of viral proteins. There is no genetic material inserted so there is no chance of a viral infection resulting from the vaccine. About anthrax: From 1955-1994, US cases totaled 235, with 224 cases of cutaneous anthrax, 11 cases of inhalational anthrax, and 20 fatalities. So this is about 5 or 6 per year, which means there is no reason to be really concerned about the Florida case unless, as treeman says, there are several more cases reported in the next couple of days.
Thanks for the brush-up, dylan. My books are all in storage in Houston... This case is no reason for concern, despite the coincidence.
