A cold front came in yesterday and it's been in the 50's today, which is cold in FL. When the northeast gets a cold front it often pushes cold stuff all the way down.....Weird.
Every year I get bioterrorism training, the anthrax thing was diagnosed by dermatologists in New York City, people had sores on their hands and faces that weren't healing, they didn't go to the ER when they had just the cutaneous anthrax. The poor people who inhaled the spores and got sick right away obviously were in ER's first but nobody knew what they had until 3-5 days later when the cultures came back. So every derm conference is super pro active about the skin manifestations of every single bioterrorism agent, from nuclear skin burns to smallpox to anthrax to bubonic plague, which was used against Genoa in the 14th century as a bioterror weapon by flinging dead infected corpses over the city walls by the invaders du jour. I thought you'd like that tidbit.
There was a fantastic dermatologist speaker, the deputy surgeon general, Dr. Boris Lushniak. He had to go investigate the monkeypox epidemic in 2003 from people importing prairie dogs as pets. He showed up at this little rural clinic in Indiana in his full CDC protective headgear and full body white jumpsuit because they didn't know what they were dealing with, and he says,"you can imagine how big everybody's eyes got when I show up in my regalia and say 'now don't worry, you're fine, I'm from the government and I'm here to help' " and the whole audience roared in laughter just imagining this. Monkeypox turns out to be a fairly benign thing, not lethal, but when he was sent by the CDC they were thinking it was potential smallpox. The fear and panic such a thing would cause is unimaginable. I always pray that this never comes to pass again. The military gets vaccinated against smallpox as soon as they are deployed. Civilians still are not. We were vaccinated in the 70's and it turns out that it still confers some level of immunity but not the best. The gov't is stockpiling vaccines still, they aren't commercially available. The anthrax vaccine performs very poorly, you need so many booster shots to get immunity, most people would balk. He said only those high risk military get vaccinated, I presume the ones sent to Afghanistan, where it is endemic from sheep and goats. Needless to say I had so much food for thought, like I do after every derm meeting, it is a ton of info to process!
