2001 anthrax attacks

2001 Anthrax attacks
Location	Washington, D.C. West Palm Beach, Florida New York City Oxford, CT
Date	September 18, 2001 (2001-09-18) – October 12, 2001 (2001-10-12)
Attack type	Bioterrorism
Weapons	Anthrax bacteria
Deaths	5
Injured	17
Victims	Bob Stevens Thomas Morris Jr. Joseph Curseen Kathy Nguyen Ottilie Lundgren
Accused	Bruce Edward Ivins Steven Hatfill Al-Qaeda

The 2001 Anthrax attacks were a series of incidents in the United States. The attacks began on September 18, 2001 and lasted for several weeks. Anthrax was spread through the mail. The anthrax spores were put in envelopes and sent to several news media offices and two U.S. senate offices. 22 people were infected. Five people died. It was believed that the person who was responsible for this was Dr. Bruce Edward Ivins. He was a senior biodefense researcher who was employed by the U.S. government. Ivins killed himself in 2008. He was not prosecuted for the crime but the evidence suggests that he acted alone in mailing the envelopes.

Social reaction and media amplification

The attacks took place shortly after the September 11 attacks, when concern about further terrorism was already high. The targets included national news organizations and offices of the United States Senate, meaning that some of the institutions reporting the story were also directly involved in it. A later study of more than 20,000 American news articles described the attacks as a turning point in the public image of anthrax. Coverage increasingly presented it as a national-security and terrorism threat rather than mainly as an uncommon disease associated with animals. The researchers argued that this framing continued even during periods when the actual risk was low.

Studies of the news coverage found that uncertainty was often presented in ways that could increase fear. Kristen Alley Swain examined 833 newspaper, television, radio and wire-service reports. She found frequent speculation, unnamed sources, frightening language and confusing accounts of suspected incidents. Comparisons that would place the danger in context, explanations of scientific uncertainty and specific advice for the public were less common. A second study by Swain found that only about one quarter of the reports contained practical advice. Stories containing more emotionally charged “outrage” language were less likely to provide useful instructions.

Researchers Shahira Fahmy and Thomas J. Johnson studied the episode using the theories of agenda setting and moral panic. They found that the amount of attention given to anthrax affected how important people believed the threat to be. However, they also found that most of the people surveyed considered the reporting accurate. Their study therefore treated the episode as a process in which news attention increased the prominence of the danger, rather than simply claiming that the public acted irrationally.

The psychological effects were not limited to people living near contaminated buildings. A study of 300 people who lived far from the attack sites found that greater exposure to anthrax news early in the crisis was a strong predictor of distress. Continued exposure was also associated with later negative changes in the participants’ view of the world.

Independent opinion polls nevertheless did not show that all Americans panicked. In a Gallup survey conducted in early November 2001, 29 percent of respondents believed that they or a family member were likely to be exposed to anthrax and about one third said they were worried about exposure. Twenty-seven percent reported being more careful when handling their mail, but very few had bought protective equipment or taken other extreme precautions. A Pew Research Center survey likewise found continuing concern about terrorism, but no additional increase in reported depression or sleeplessness after the first infection at a national television network became public.

Hoaxes, false alarms and mistaken reports

The public impact of the attacks became much larger than the number of genuine contaminated letters. Thousands of suspicious powders, packages and threatening messages were reported. Many were harmless substances or deliberate hoaxes. According to the later media study by Dabezies and colleagues, more than 17,000 suspicious incidents were handled and more than 600 postal facilities were evacuated during the following year. The authors described false alarms and hoaxes as an important part of the fear and uncertainty surrounding the attacks.

The disruption continued after the immediate crisis. A 2009 investigation by the Los Angeles Times reported that powder hoaxes and false alarms still caused evacuations, lost working time, decontamination expenses, demands on emergency services and emotional distress. The report argued that such incidents had become a lasting social and financial consequence of the original attacks, even though very few later powder threats contained a dangerous substance.

Some news reports also connected the anthrax letters to foreign governments before evidence supported such a conclusion. ABC News repeatedly reported, using anonymous sources, that the powder contained bentonite and that this might connect it to an Iraqi biological-weapons program. The bentonite claim was incorrect. Retrospective reporting by The Washington Post later identified it as one of the network’s major reporting errors. The error showed how anonymous claims and speculation could strengthen public associations between the mailings, foreign terrorism and the wider political response to September 11.

Communication problems also occurred at the local level. A study of incorrect reports of anthrax infections in New Jersey found that organizational failures allowed uncertain information to be repeated as fact. The researchers argued that the errors were not caused only by individual journalists, but also by poor communication among hospitals, public-health organizations, universities and news organizations.

Unequal social effects

The social and psychological effects were not distributed equally. Postal employees, media workers and government staff were more likely than the general public to face evacuation, testing, antibiotic treatment and uncertainty about whether their workplaces were safe. Interviews and focus groups involving postal workers found that changing recommendations about antibiotics, vaccination and medical research contributed to confusion and distrust. Some African-American postal workers compared requests to take part in vaccine research with the history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

A study of 137 employees working on Capitol Hill found that the attacks caused serious workplace disruption and loss of trust even among some people who were not medically exposed. Thirty percent of the unexposed employees believed that they had been exposed, and some sought medical care for symptoms they thought were caused by anthrax. Among employees with positive nasal tests, researchers found substantial rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric disorders.

The attacks also changed the postal system. New screening technologies, restricted access to mail facilities and procedures for handling suspicious items became permanent features of postal security. Sociologist Ryan Ellis estimated that decontamination, lost revenue and security changes cost several billion dollars. He argued that the resulting system did not affect all users equally and that some security measures protected large commercial mailers more effectively than postal employees and the general public.

In later years, anthrax remained strongly associated in American news coverage with terrorism, weapons and national security. The long-term study by Dabezies and colleagues found that this association remained prominent even though naturally occurring anthrax and occupational exposure were more relevant to most actual cases. The authors described this as a lasting stigma produced by the media framing that developed during the 2001 attacks.