AILESBURY: 'How Bacillus anthracis deliverered the Jews to the promised land' by Dr. Patrick Treacy

June 21, 2009 - PRLog -- I am Bacillus anthracis, a literary type bacterium that gets its name from anthracis, (Greek: coal), a reference to the legendary coal-black scabs that I leave behind on some of my friends. I say literary type because my exploits have been reported as the fifth plague of Egypt in the Bible, the sixth plague in the Book of Exodus, the plague in Homer's Iliad, and I am even lamented by Virgil in his novels of ancient Rome. I could have had a hat trick if Shakespeare would have a lived another couple of years later and witnessed the "Black Bane," that awful plague that killed 60,000 people and many more domestic and wild animals in Europe during the 1600’s. Well, now you know, that was me as well! Anyway, where exactly was I? Oh yes, I was telling you about my exploits during the fifth plague of Egypt! (Exodus 9:3) You know, to be fair, I really feel guilty about that one, because I really consider myself responsible for the present Middle East conflict and indirectly for Al Quida’s eventual destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. It’s really a bit ironic that Islamic fundamentalists would now try and use me in their present endeavour of revivalism and hope to bring down Semite America, because I actually started that trouble thousands of years before. Well, as the Irish would say ‘it’s a long road that has no turning’. Because in the good book it says that God told Moses to confront the Pharaoh and tell him to let the Hebrews go, or terrible pestilence would visit the Pharaoh's fields "upon the horses, upon the donkeys, upon the camels, upon the herds and flocks: There shall be a very grievous moraine. And the Lord did that thing on the morrow and all the cattle of Egypt died: but the cattle of the children of Israel died not one."
Yes, it was me who finally convinced the obstinate Pharaoh to release the ancient Hebrews, after a series of other devastating plagues, back in 1300 B.C. The first ones turned the River Nile to blood red and made it undrinkable. The later ones caused the destruction of all the first-born of Egypt in a single night. ere for a while, up came the Romans who scattered them like willow across the lands. And then But it took me, the fifth plague, which killed all the cattle in Egypt, to convince him to let the Hebrews go. Well, to be fair, I couldn’t be bothered making friends with any those Jewish livestock as they grazed in the poorer ground. ‘What, me! The bacterium of Virgil and the Iliad, hanging around with some tawny Yiddish heifers. The upshot of it all was that the Pharaoh became convinced that their God had spared their cattle and let them go wandering back to the land of Canaan. Well, after they settled thafter a few lamentations, they made their way back to the land of Canaan, much to the distress of the Pharaoh’s descendants. Well, before I know it, the whole thing blows up again and soon the Pharaoh’s children’s friends are talking in neo-Koranic convolutions, demolishing towers and posting me to every other Caanite in the New World. It’s a bit like that joke about…!

Anyway, where was I? En route to the Third World War by the sound of things! Now my author is running late to discuss the new health strategy on television, but it doesn’t matter for after the Twin Towers, the money to fund has run out, so you can blame me for that as well. So, we’d better speed up through the centuries to the dear old Clausthalian physician, Robert Koch. Robert was born the same year that Richard Wagner wrote "The Flying Dutchman", and astounded his parents at the age of five by telling them that he could read the newspaper. There’s always one! In 1872, he then volunteered to become the District Medical Officer for Wollstein to do his bit for the Fatherland in the Franco-Prussian War. Being bored in his little flat in the long French evenings, he took to working out why I had so many fans among the livestock of the village. Well, you should have seen him, dissecting me out from the spleens of cattle with a kitchen knife, inoculating mice he found with little slivers of wood, growing my families to be sturdy on meals of ox’s eyes and potatoes. Well, you had to be proud of him, especially when you consider that Saddam later spent millions trying to do the same. All the poor doctor had was an old microscope and from that he laid down the conditions, known as Koch's postulates, which must be satisfied before it can be accepted a particular bacteria cause a particular disease. Then to get back to the land of the Pharaoh, in 1883 he went to Egypt to investigate an outbreak of cholera and discovered Haemophilus aegyptius was the cause of Egyptian ophthalmia. But that’s another days work. Until Robert Koch appeared on the scene, I struck terror in every village as I wiped out entire livestock after the grazing animals consumed my endospores, which were hidden in soil.

As the new century dawned, I started spreading the good word amongst the factories, especially to the mill workers who handled infected animal hairs, wools, or hides and they called the condition ‘woolsorters' or even ragpickers' disease. In the early 1900s, over a hundred people in the United States alone contracted me every year. Then came the First World War and I befriended Anton Dilger, an Imperial German agent who decided to grow me in a corner of his Washington home. He got his friends on the docks in Baltimore to inject my spores into over 3,000 horses and mules destined for the Allied forces in Europe. Most of the animals died, and many hundreds of soldiers on the Western Front were infected with disease. Overnight, I had become a bioweapon. Well, the years passed and in 1937, the Japanese decided to try me out on an extended holiday in Manchuria. In 1942, the British military began experimenting with me on Gruinard Island, a 500-acre dot of land off the northwestern coast of Scotland. They thought that I would quickly die or blow away into the ocean. But I lived on and remained infectious year after year. Finally, in 1986, after critics labelled Gruinard "Anthrax Island," the British government decided to clean up the mess. In the spring of 1979, I killed 66 people in the industrial city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), Russia.
In 1992, a team of Russian and U.S. scientists concluded that a local military facility had accidentally released a cloud of anthrax bacteria, killing scores of people and animals who inhaled it. The outbreak might have provided a wealth of data about me, but true to form, the KGB confiscated most relevant medical records, leaving only autopsy notes and tissue samples behind. But, the Soviets have had it hard enough lately, so lets head south to Iraq, who started researching me at the Muthana chemical weapons centre in 1985. They later grew me in larger scale fermenters at their Al Salman plant, and even went into larger-scale production at Al Hakam in 1989. Saddam had manufactured over 8,500 litres by 1990 and it is generally thought that he probably wanted to send it all back by Scud missile to the land of Canaan. I mean what it is about these friends of the Pharaoh who spend half of their lives trying to get me to settle in Israel.
Then in July 1993, Aum Shinrikyo, Japan’s Supreme Truth cult starting brooding and imported some of my cousins from the United States to bring up as a family in their general headquarters in Koto Ward, Tokyo. When they released the family from the building, they just couldn’t hack it in the big smoke. Well what do you expect from a crowd of frightened hillbillies that were once used as a vaccine for cattle in a Northern Arizona University. But be mindful of those Aum Shinrikyo cult members because the last I saw of them, they were going to Zaire, on supposed medical mission. The actual purpose of the trip to Central Africa was to bring back samples of Ebola virus, which reminds me I should probably get off to bed and chat about that one next week.

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