Anthrax Doctor’s Quick Thinking

The elderly man’s labored breathing and fever seemed nothing more exotic than a bad case of pneumonia. But then Dr. Carlos Omenaca got a troubling call.

It was the patient’s boss. A fellow employee had just been diagnosed with anthrax, he said, the deadly inhaled form of the disease.

Hardly a U.S. doctor alive had ever seen a case of inhaled anthrax. Could this be another one? …The patient was Ernesto Blanco, the 73-year-old mailroom worker, who in retrospect turned out to be the first person hospitalized in the anthrax attacks and the first to survive the inhaled form of the disease. Wired