Amid fears, antibiotic selling fast: “Pharmacists in New York have sold greater-than-normal amounts of antibiotics for treating anthrax, a highly contagious and potentially fatal disease, amid rising fear of biological warfare.
Sales of antibiotics normally rise in September, when children return to school and parents worry about their exposure to infections. But pharmacists said the sale of Bayer AG’s antimicrobial drug Cipro are much higher than usual.” So reports the Boston Globe, which also has an opinion piece exhorting the U.S. to take this opportunity to reinstitute Iraqi weapons inspections.
Meanwhile, in the New York Times, frightened Europeans snap up gas masks, an editorial on the specter of biological terror, and a report on added security for dams, reservoirs and aqueducts.
In my region, the Quabbin Reservoir in Western Massachusetts, which supplies much of Boston’s water supply, has been “off-line” since last weekend when two light aircraft swooped low over its waters. Experts attempt to reassure us that contaminating the water supply is not as easy as most doomsday scenarios would have it, because the volume of reservoirs is so great that anything short of multiple truckloads of toxic material would be diluted to harmlessness. Will post-attack fears heighten watershed consciousness? How many urban dwellers even know with confidence where their drinking water comes from? Should we all become much more conversant with the language of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare)? The Bush admnistration had been reluctant to sign a treaty (one of the many at which it thumbed its nose in its go-it-alone stance until Sept. 11th) that would have tightened controls on the production of biological agents, supposedly because it would have obligated us to reveal details of our so-called “defensive” research into virulent strains of anthrax and who knows what else. Will the administration be able to get away with this with a population more highly educated about the terrible potential of biological weaponry?
