Did Reliance Upon Animal Testing Cause Grave Miscalculation of Anthrax Threat?
December 3, 2001 I’ve previously written about the stupidity of relying on animal testing to find cures for human diseases. Now it seems that reliance on this discredited, barbaric process has come back to haunt us in connection with the anthrax attacks against our country. The media assured us over and over that in order to contract a case of inhalation anthrax, a person would have to inhale a huge number of spores, 8-10,000 of them. It was joked that one would practically have to snort the powder from the envelope to inhale that much. But then Ottilie W. Lundgren, a 94-year-old Connecticut woman, and Kathy T. Nguyen, a 61-year-old hospital worker from the Bronx, died of inhalation anthrax without any seeming such snorting having gone on. The “authorities” have now concluded that these two women may have each simply come into contact with a letter that itself had come into contact in a mail-sorting machine with the letter containing the anthrax: Initially, federal health officials sai
