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CNN SATURDAY
Anthrax Expert Mary Gilchrist Discusses Possible Origins of Anthrax Attacks
Aired November 3, 2001 - 16:15 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: President Bush is praising the American people for remaining calm during the anthrax attacks. The government is unsure who is behind them, but Mr. Bush says that the odds of getting anthrax are small, even though the odds of getting the disease are long.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: More than 30 billion pieces of mail have moved through the Postal Service since September the 11th. So, we believe the odds of any one piece of mail being tainted are very low.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HARRIS: Well, just how serious is the anthrax threat and what should individuals do to protect themselves? Just two questions that many people are asking themselves now. Mary Gilchrist is with us now. She is in Boston, and she's got some answers for us, we hope, this afternoon. She heads the Iowa State Hygiene Lab, and she is also president of the Association of Public Health Labs.
Thank you very much for taking time to talk with us this afternoon.
MARY GILCHRIST, ANTHRAX EXPERT: Good afternoon.
HARRIS: Let's begin with the idea of where you think this anthrax that is surfacing in the mail is actually coming from. You say that you don't believe this is being produced in any homemade labs. What makes you think that?
GILCHRIST: Well originally, it was thought perhaps it was made in a laboratory in Iowa, which was pretty unusual event, because it was said to be man-made. And it came from actually a strain, an Ames strain, we understand, which did come from Iowa, came from some cattle, I believe, somewhere else in the country.
And then, the Ames strain was shared with other scientists throughout the nation and perhaps throughout the world. So, we can't really attribute it to Iowa or to a laboratory. It was probably shared with a variety of people, and perhaps someone got their hands on it. HARRIS: Are you as surprised as some of the experts that we've been talking to in the last couple of weeks about how much we've learned in the last couple of weeks about anthrax and how it is spread, that sort of thing? Because you've been working with it for quite some time. It's been in laboratories here in the U.S. for decades. Are you surprised at how much we've been able to learn lately?
GILCRHIST: Well, certainly many of us were surprised to learn that these spores would pass through the paper of an envelope, and I think those experiments might well have been tested in advance, but we certainly didn't have our hands on the kind of preparation that's being used, so our tests would not probably has been valid.
Yes indeed, we have learned a lot. And we do have a bit more to learn.
HARRIS: Let me ask you this, is it true that up until -- what was it, 1996 -- anyone in the world -- anyone who wanted some could actually just go up to -- find the right source and just buy it in the United States? Is that correct?
GILCRHIST: Right, they passed the select agent rule in that year, and now you have to prove that you have a safe way to handle the organism. You have to indicate that you have a real need for the organism. And before that time, it could be purchased from a culture collection. There are a couple dozen culture collections around the world, and you can purchase it really for -- having no real credentials.
HARRIS: If you had to guess right now, how much would you say there is actually in existence right now? I know we've been told that the Russians have, perhaps, 4,000 metric tons of it.
GILCHRIST: It is stated that they produced that amount during the heyday of their bioterrorism industry in the '50s, '60s and '70s and beyond. Obviously, we know that some was buried on an island. We don't know where the rest went, and that's cause for some of our concern.
HARRIS: I have to ask you about this, we got word that your lab actually had something of an anthrax scare itself, with the cake mix? Can you explain to us what happened there?
GILCHRIST: Well, you know, every powder now is the cause for concern. A little bit of powder in the bottom of a grocery sack to me is flower, unless proven otherwise, and no cause for panic. But indeed, there was some large bag of cake mix spilled outside our laboratory on the asphalt, and we cleaned it up and tested it to make sure it wasn't anthrax, because some people had been exposed.
Later, we learned that it was cake mix. So, I think the bottom line is: Clean up a powder if you spill it. It's causing a lot of concern for people.
HARRIS: You know, and I can see that same thing happening in coffee rooms in different offices, like this one here, across the country, too. Good advice there, clean up the mess, folks.
Mary Gilchrist, thank you very much for your time. We sure appreciate it. Take care.
GILCHRIST: Thank you.
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