Anthrax double standard
Judge rejects workers' plea, keeps postal building
open
By G. Dunkel
New York
On Nov. 9, in response to a suit by the postal union, a
federal judge refused to order that Morgan Station postal
facility in midtown Manhattan be closed, even though anthrax
spores had been found on equipment there. Workers at Morgan
Station process 12.5 million pieces of mail a day.
The judge ruled that the New York Metro Postal Union failed
to show a "likelihood of irreparable harm" to its members.
The judge did order Postal Service management to test the
main post office on Eighth Avenue across from Penn Station,
known as the Farley Building.
"Testing at Farley is nice but it's not what we needed,"
said William Smith, president of the New York Metro Area Postal
Union. "That place [Morgan] should be closed, simply that."
When traces of anthrax were found in a Senate office
building in Washington, the offices shut down. They remain
closed.
Local authorities closed post offices in Colorado and
Maryland to test the buildings and the people who work in them.
A number of post offices in New Jersey have been shut down for
decontamination and reopened. A few remain closed, pending test
results.
Health care, not health scare
The medical crisis appears to be subsiding. No new cases of
anthrax and no new contaminated letters have been reported in
recent days.
But political developments around the anthrax crisis are not
subsiding.
On Nov. 10 the FBI released a "profile" indicating that the
anthrax attacks are not linked to Osama bin Laden or Iraq but
to a male loner in this country who hates media figures. This
virtual admission that the anthrax attack is most likely from a
homegrown terrorist came too late to influence the debate and
voting on the repressive anti-terrorist bill, which is aimed
especially at immigrants.
The Centers for Disease Control--the division of the
department of Health and Human Services charged with managing
the U.S. public-health system--was unprepared for even this
small outbreak of anthrax. Its technicians and doctors who
track the spread of disease have reportedly been working 18
hours a day, seven days a week since early October, often
sleeping in their labs.
It is yet another indication that the public health system
has been downgraded by a political structure dominated by the
vast for-profit medical industry. Little attention was paid
when diseases of the poor, like tuberculosis, began reemerging
a few years ago.
Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who directed the smallpox
eradication program in the 1970s, has just been hired to create
and direct a new Office of Public Health Preparedness in the
CDC.
In an Oct. 13 interview with The Ottawa Citizen, after
anthrax was identified in Florida, Henderson acknowledged, "We
have a public-health structure which is really very weak and
it'll have to be a lot stronger, if not for bioterrorism, for
looking at all of the new and emerging infections."
He continued, "We do not have in this country the surge
capacity for a hospital to take in many acute patients."
Rebuilding a public-health system that has been under-funded
and understaffed for years would obviously take considerable
resources and effort. But giving billions of dollars to big
pharmaceutical giants, beefing up police agencies and spending
billions more on war and racism and repression will just make
the problem more acute.
Reprinted from the Nov. 22, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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Email: ww@workers.org
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