Antrax Facts - Information on Anthrax You May Not Know

Anthrax information compiled from various reliable medical sources:

by Mercia Tapping, President, AllergyBuyersClub.com

Anthrax is a very scary germ because it travels in spores. It is very resilient and has been known to survive hundreds of years in pharaohs' tombs. The spores are near lifeless and can travel inside a hard shell which is resistant to boiling heat or freezing cold which kills other normal bacteria.

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• Do you have flu or anthrax? Experts say that when you have the flu you get a runny nose, sore throat, muscle aches and headaches, and often yellow sputum. Anthrax victims have trouble breathing, have intense debilitating fatigue and are prostrate in their beds, with almost clear sputum. Anthrax victims feel sicker than they ever have felt before. Please get your flu shot. I have had mine already. As an allergy sufferer I was on a priority list.
• Only blood tests can really confirm/disconfirm the presence of anthrax. Nasal swabs are not sufficient.
• With cutaneous anthrax, a black scab develops. Most of these people survive if treated with antibiotics.
• The most lethal form of anthrax comes from the inhalation of lung penetrating particles. The anthrax floating around lately is about 1 to 5 microns. TOO SMALL for you to even see it with the naked eye.
• One or two spores of anthrax is probably not going to kill you. In fact, experts estimate that 5 to 10,000 spores may be needed to kill you.
• There are no reliable anthrax early warning detection systems available yet on a consumer level (people are working on them). The problem is that while air detection equipment can detect changes in air density, they cannot reliably distinguish WHY and can give you all sorts of false positives. Incidently, this is why I do not like those machines which purport to tell you when there is pollen in the room. Truthfully, those machines cannot distinguish one kind of particle from another.
• Microwaving your mail will not "sanitize" it. Microwaves work by heating water and anthrax spores have no water in them.
• The same goes for using an iron (intense heat) on your mail. By the time the heat is hot enough to kill anthrax spores, your mail would be on fire.
• Moist heat can but we are not convinced yet that our vapor steam cleaners we currently sell are up to the task.
• You need 260 degrees of moist heat but applied at 15 pounds of pressure for 15 minutes or more. This is not an easy process, and could spread spores. We are watching this one.
• Exposing Anthrax to ultra violet light. Yes, ultraviolet light can kill anthrax spores. But this is tricky as ALL anthrax spores need to be exposed to the light for the prerequisite time period, and endospores are known to be very resistant to both heat and UV radiation (we are investigating this one closely for you). UV lights will NOT penetrate the mail, UV lights work on bacteria on surfaces.
• Alcohol, acetone and household disinfectants do not work in killing anthrax.
• Save your pennies on gas masks. They are only effective if they are fresh and are custom fitted, filter spore size down to .5 microns, and are worn before an anthrax exposure (as if anybody is going to warn us what they are doing). And if you do not wear them properly you can suffocate.
• Surfaces contaminated with anthrax can be cleaned up with a 1:10 solution of warm water and household bleach.
• Buildings can be fumigated with formaldehyde or ethylene oxide but this is a job for the experts.
• The post office is buying high energy electron beam machines to sanitize the mail at $5 million a piece. They can do the job.

 

First Published: November 2001
Updated: April 2007

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