[wordup] More on News and Foreign Anthrax

[Adam Shand]

Via: The Eristocracy <Eristocracy at merrymeet.com>
From: pburch at bcm.tmc.edu (Paula Burch)

[Editor's note: This is somewhat distressing to me. I'd found it
reassuring that there'd been anthrax elsewhere. This lends support to the
hypothesis that the anthrax is by domestic people, likely the sort who
view The Turner Diaries as an operations manual. -- jdcc]

It turns out that this specific charge is unfounded. Although I certainly
agree that US news is frequently insular - I've seen too little
information on which non-US countries are mobilizing troops, for example -
the vast majority of cases in Alistair Cooke's quoted "16 countries" with
anthrax-containing letters turned out not to involve anthrax at all,
merely hysteria over harmless materials in powder form, which is far less
newsworthy. The one definite exception, a letter which was received in
Kenya, was reported even in my local newspaper, the Houston Chronicle. (It
is unclear to me whether a letter in Argentina was truly positive for
anthrax spores, or merely the other bacilli which cause positive results
in preliminary tests.)