How can anthrax be transmitted

Anthrax became widely known in when it was used as a biological weapon. Powdered anthrax spores were sent via letters in U. This anthrax attack resulted in five deaths and 17 illnesses, making it one of the worst biological attacks in the history of the United States. You can get anthrax through indirect or direct contact by touching, inhaling, or ingesting anthrax spores. Once anthrax spores get inside your body and activate, the bacteria multiply, spread, and produce toxins.

Anthrax can be used as a biological weapon, but this is very rare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC suggest that anthrax is one of the most likely agents to be used in a biological attack. Despite the attack, anthrax is uncommon in the United States. Anthrax illness is more common in farm animals than people. Humans have an increased risk of getting anthrax if they:. It usually looks like an insect bite.

The sore quickly develops into a blister. So far, no cases of injection anthrax have been reported in the United States. Skip directly to site content Skip directly to page options Skip directly to A-Z link. Section Navigation.

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Syndicate. How People Get Anthrax. Minus Related Pages. People get anthrax by: Breathing in spores, Eating food or drinking water that is contaminated with spores, or Getting spores in a cut or scrape in the skin. Anthrax is more common in developing countries and countries that do not have veterinary public health programs that routinely vaccinate animals against anthrax. In the United States, yearly vaccination of livestock is recommended in areas where animals have had anthrax in the past.

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What is Anthrax? He gives many details, gleaned secondhand, about the accidental release of anthrax from the bioweapons facility in Sverdlovsk in , which killed at least 66 people.

He recounts the Soviet cover-up and the successful duping of many US scientists as late as by a tour of Soviet specialists carrying selected "evidence" that the outbreak was due to eating contaminated meat, despite the fact, obvious to myself and others at the time of the tour, that this explanation could not account for the lack of reported cases in children.

But Alibek insists on a March 30 date for the accident that does not jibe with the one deduced from meteorological data reported by the local airport, which showed that only on April 2 could the plume of aerosol have covered the part of the city that was infected. And he does not mention that necropsy specimens were hidden from the KGB by the widow of the pathologist involved, and were given to US scientists in These specimens reveal that the cases were of pulmonary anthrax, not gastrointestinal disease.