Anthrax – After a Shower of Anthrax, an Illness and a Mystery
New York Times – During the anthrax mail attacks in 2001, Bill Paliscak, a gung-ho, hockey-playing postal investigator who had missed 3 days of work in 11 years, removed a filthy filter above a mail-sorting machine to preserve it as evidence. Anthrax-laden dust showered down on him. Four days later he began to feel feverish. Soon he was in intensive care. After spending the next three years in and out of the hospital, Mr. Paliscak, 41, now needs a wheelchair to move about, sleeps with a breathing device to get enough oxygen and takes dozens of pills a day???Yet Mr. Paliscak (pronounced PAL-uh-sack) remains a medical puzzle. Blood tests never detected the bacteria that cause anthrax or the antibodies the immune system should produce in response. As a result, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention never classified his disease with the 11 confirmed cases of inhalational anthrax, 5 of them fatal.
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