Anthrax scares a different part of the new war

To appreciate the disproportionate fear of anthrax that has seized America’s imagination in the last week or so, it might be instructive to step back and consider the numbers.

According to a risk expert with the Conference of Consulting Actuaries, cited in a recent issue of USA Today, the chances that any one of us might die from anthrax poisoning stands at a whopping 1 in 500 million. That means you are 71,500 times more likely to die in a car crash this year than you are by inhaling a lethal dose of the world’s most dreaded spore du jour. In fact, as the actuarial expert has calculated, you are 8,300 times more likely to be killed by walking across the street than by anthrax infection (even greater, for that matter, if you’re a pedestrian trying to navigate one of Bangor’s downtown crosswalks at rush hour).

The fact that one person so far has died from anthrax in this country, and that dozens more have been exposed to the real thing, does little to alter the staggering odds against any one of us becoming the next terrorist target. We face a much greater risk of dying in a roller-coaster accident, in case you’re interested.

Yet despite the overwhelmingly reassuring numbers, we have managed to make the infinitesimal threat of anthrax infection our bomb scare for the millennium, and we’ve done it more completely than any murder-minded terrorist could have dreamed possible. In this strange new psychological war, in which we’ve been reduced to finding the seeds of our destruction in every white powdery substance we come across, we have seen the enemy and it is corn starch.

I certainly don’t mean to discount the legitimate threat anthrax poses, or the reasonable fear it instills in all of us. I’m only passing along a call from health experts who suggest that a level-headed perspective might keep us from playing so easily into the hands of any ghoulish prankster out there with an envelope, a stamp and a bag of Gold Medal flour. As Dr. Kathleen Gensheimer, the Maine epidemiologist, pointed out recently, “Everyone across the nation is concerned about this potential threat, and the latest cases heighten those fears. But if fear is driving people to become … not logical in their thinking, the terrorists are succeeding.”

Gensheimer could easily have been referring to that woman in California, for instance, who managed to ground an airplane for three hours and force 80 passengers into a decontamination tent by reporting that she saw a man releasing a “powdery substance” into the ventilation system. The suspicious dust turned out to be confetti that had spilled when the poor birthday boy opened a greeting card.

Or perhaps Gensheimer was talking about the woman who alerted authorities when she spotted some white powder lying near a stack of mail she brought into the house a while before. The mysterious substance was actually powdered baby formula her husband had been mixing nearby.

And even in these legitimately anxious times, wasn’t it a bit of a stretch for that New Hampshire resident to call the cops about a sweepstakes letter he got in the mail – not because it contained even a trace of suspicious powder, but merely because it carried the postmark of Boca Raton, Fla., the site of the nation’s first anthrax alert?

Maybe one day, when this anthrax scare has subsided, we’ll again be able to walk into a restroom off the interstate in Hampden, Maine, see a trail of powder on the floor, and think not of some lurking terrorist but of the harmless, dusty construction worker who brought the stuff in on his clothing or the mother who just finished powdering her baby’s bottom.

The president certainly wasn’t kidding when he told us to prepare for “a different kind of war.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.