2023-10-09 19:32:00
On October 9, 2001, the FBI opened an investigation into anthrax cases in the United States that caused the death of five people.
Very few days had passed after the terrorist attacks against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, when several anthrax attacks occurred, later known as “Amerithrax.”
The bacteria were sent via anonymous letters with postmarks from Trenton, New Jersey, to several news agencies in Florida and New York and to a Congressional building in Washington.
The letters were addressed to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy and the New York post offices.
Anthrax or anthrax emerged in the First World War as a biological weapon and its transmission occurs in three ways.
The infection can be cutaneous, through the skin, through inhalation, through the lungs and gastrointestinal, through digestion, as detailed by doctor Alberto Sanagustín.
As a more recent precedent, we can cite the escape of anthrax spores that occurred in a laboratory in the Soviet Union in 1979.
Or what happened in Ukraine in October 2018
Of the five fatal victims of the attack in the United States, two were postal workers.
The other three were a woman from Connecticut, a Manhattan hospital worker from the Bronx and a magazine employee from Florida.
Since what happened, the FBI interviewed more than ten thousand people and issued more than six thousand subpoenas.
However, no arrests were made for the attacks despite authorities saying they had a suspect who acted alone.
In the wake of the attack, the US Postal Service purchased five million masks and ninety thousand gloves for all of its employees.
Additionally, 300 postal facilities were tested for anthrax and 32,000 people took antibiotics due to possible exposure to the deadly bacteria.
Finally, in August 2008, the United States officially declared Bruce Ivins, a researcher at Fort Detrick, the Army Medical Command, and the FBI’s lead consultant on the scientific aspects of the attacks, guilty of the 2001 anthrax attacks.
However, Ivins committed suicide a month earlier upon learning that he was going to be indicted.
The 2001 anthrax attacks also generated the largest epidemiological investigation of an infectious disease outbreak in the public health history of the United States.
On October 9, 2001, the FBI opened an investigation into anthrax cases in the United States that caused the death of five people.
The story is also news on Radio Perfil. Script by Eduardo Santachita and voiceover by Pita Fortín.
by Radio Profile
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