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October 23, 2001
Carl
Estabrook
Just War
or
The Rule of Lawlessness?
Patrick
Cockburn
Errant
Bombs at Bagram
George
Monbiot
War
and Oil
Robert
Jensen
Crushing
Academic Dissent
October 22, 2001
Hamit
Dardagah
The
New Newspeak
Tom
Turnipseed
War
on the Poor
Patrick Cockburn
Killing
Mullah Omar's Child
David
Vest
The
War on Women
Shepherd
Bliss
Advice
from a Vietnam Vet
Hani
Shukrallah
Capital
Strikes Back
October 21, 2001
Donald
Rumsfeld
The
al-Jazeera Interview
Mark
Scaramella
Nuclear
Anxiety
October 19, 2001
Mohammed
Sid-Ahmed
Bush's
Palestinian State
Michael
Colby
A
Mailroom Manifesto
October 18, 2001
Mahajan
and Jensen
Avoiding
a New Cold War
Patrick
Cockburn
US
Planes Pound Taliban
Jamey Hecht
Gerald Ford
and the CIA
Mokhiber
and Weisman
3
Arguments
Against This War
October 17, 2001
Ballinger
and Marsh
Music
and War Resistance
Steve
Perry
The
Anthrax Chronicles
Chris
Kromm
Operation
Infinite Disaster
Susan
Block
Sex
Not Bombs
David Vest
Osama Speaks
October 16, 2001
Steve
Perry
War
Without Frontiers
Douglas
Valentine
The
CIA and Anthrax
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Battle of Mazar-i-Sharif
John
Troyer
Return
to Normal?
Moji Agha
A
Jihad Against Ignorance
October
15, 2001
Tariq
Ali
Alternatives
to War
John
Pilger
War
American Style
Umberto
Eco
The
Roots of Conflict
Marwan
Bishara
Clash
of Civilizations? Hardly
Resources:
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Ridge Long Groomed
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Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
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The Not-So-Great
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Crop Duster
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Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James
Ridgeway
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October
23, 2001
Cipro?
We Got Your Stinkin' Cipro
The Administration's
Stiff Upper Lip Can't Hide the Perilous State of the Public Health
System
By Steve Perry
In the past week the government has toiled ceaselessly
to assure a restive public that the bioterror threat is under
control, even as our elected representatives were lighting out
for the territories at the first sign of anthrax spores on Capitol
Hill. But never fear. Americans at large face minimal risk, the
feds are hot on the trail of the terrorists and there will be
antibiotics enough for all. It's true the public health risk-so
far-is low unless you happen to be a Congressional aide, or secretary
to a network news luminary. Or, of course, a postal worker like
those unfortunate souls in Trenton and D.C. who were still being
told they didn't need testing while the House and Senate sounded
retreat. Two of them are dead now, and at least two more are
likely to follow; some wire accounts refer obliquely to an additional
eight or nine post office staffers whose illnesses are deemed
"suspicious." Again, though, have no fear. The New
York Times reports the White House has made discreet inquiries
about purchasing equipment to irradiate the mail and kill any
spores inside-inside the mail bound for federal government offices,
that is.
Meantime investigators are phoning around
to see if, and where, any anthrax has gone missing from labs
lately. This portion of the official PR campaign is ludicrous.
It seeks to comfort the public by implying that there's something
exceptional, and therefore likely to be traceable, about the
process of getting one's hands on a sample of anthrax. Until
very recently, at least, the opposite has been closer to the
truth. Anthrax cultures are kept in countless labs in the U.S.
and elsewhere. According to Michael Osterholm's book, Living
Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist
Catastrophe, they could be ordered from any of 50-plus commercial
vendors around the world as recently as 1998. But to say as much
would only promulgate more panic; this is not an option.
Consequently there's a great deal of
serious-sounding hoohah about "weapons-grade" and "non-weapons-grade"
spores, much of it from officials still struggling to get straight
whether anthrax is a virus or a bacterium. To pretend there is
any means of tracing a particular strain to a single lab, or
a country where it was acquired, is only blowing smoke. There
has been conjecture that the strain now circulating may have
come from an Ames, Iowa, veterinary lab originally, but suppose
that's so-there's no telling when it was lifted or whether it
then fell into the hands of terrorists from Kabul, Kuala Lumpur,
or Des Moines. Unless police agencies get lucky in locating the
perpetrator or perpetrators by other means (an acquaintance,
perhaps, a nosy neighbor) they'll probably never know the pedigree
of the spores. Which doesn't mean they won't concoct one. Remember
always that Iraq a) is known to possess anthrax and b) was on
the Pentagon's short list of preferred targets even before the
first powdered letter arrived.
But these sleights of hand concerning
the investigation are a small thing compared to the whoppers
being passed off about public health. To date we've seen no sign
of any wide-scale public release of spores through open air or
the ventilation systems of large buildings, but it remains entirely
in the realm of possibility. It's no trick growing the bacteria
in quantity; the tougher part is milling it to a size that can
cause infection in the lungs, and whoever is behind the attacks
has already proven they can do that.
If one or more such mass releases were
to occur, the public health system is in no way prepared to respond.
Osterholm's book paints a revolting picture. The government has
no plan for meeting bioterror, he writes, just a Babel of conflicting
jurisdictions and priorities; and the health care system itself
is strained to the breaking point by the unbridled gouging of
managed care consortiums and their suppliers of equipment and
medicine. For years health care syndicates been taking sumptuous
profits and reinvesting token sums in the capacity of the system.
Relatively minor flu outbreaks already cause crises in major
urban hospitals, and the numbers of people involved are minuscule
compared to what we might see in a concerted bio-war attack.
The deeper fissures in the public health
system are not yet widely evident to those Americans who enjoy
private health insurance; right now everyone's looking at drug
supplies. And in the aftermath of September 11 there has been
no spectacle here at home quite as galling as watching the pharmaceutical
companies cast both eyes to the bottom line and dig in their
heels, and seeing governments capitulate. When the Canadian health
service ordered large quantities of a generic Cipro clone as
a precautionary measure, the German patent-holder, Bayer AG,
howled to the heavens and threatened litigation. Canada backed
down. (Cipro, by the way, is not the only drug likely to be viable
for treating anthrax exposure, nor Bayer the only recalcitrant
patent owner; it belongs to a family of relatively new antibiotics
known as fluoroquinolones.) South of the border the reaction
has been even more timorous. Pursuant to 28 USC 1498, the American
government has the legal authority to declare patents on essential
goods null and void in a national crisis, despite Health and
Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson's plaintive cries to
the contrary last week. On Monday, finally, George W. Bush issued
an executive order asserting that prerogative-with a twist.
After last month's airline aid package,
Bush feinted at drawing a line in the sand: Read my lips;
no new bailouts. But his executive order struck a very different
chord. In the event that the U.S. might maybe someday need to,
you know, violate drug patents, then Thompson's HHS would be
empowered to pick up the tab for any legal and financial risks
that fell to the manufacturers of patented drugs or their generic
substitutes. National emergency or no, in other words, the United
States will subsidize pharmaceutical companies who see their
almighty patents trod upon. On the bright side, however, Bayer
AG has agreed to stop the profiteering it has practiced since
the anthrax scare first surfaced. In reaching its settlement
with Canada, the company announced it would scale back its soaring
wholesale prices for Cipro to pre-September 11 levels. CP
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