2001 anthrax attacksDeath in the air: Revisiting the 2001 anthrax mailings and the Amerithrax investigation

By Glenn Cross

Published 25 January 2019

Time may have dimmed the memory of the 2001 anthrax attacks and the sense of urgency surrounding the efforts to identify the attacker. The attacks, which involved mailings of five anthrax-laced letters to prominent senators and media outlets, killed five individuals and made seventeen others ill. The anthrax mailings played a crucial role in raising concerns over possible terrorist use of biological agents in attacks against the homeland. As a result of the anthrax scare, Americans’ perceptions of terrorism came to include an existential fear of biological terrorism.

Time may have dimmed the memory of the 2001 anthrax attacks and the sense of urgency surrounding the efforts to identify the attacker. The attacks, which involved mailings of five anthrax-laced letters to prominent senators and media outlets, killed five individuals and made seventeen others ill.

Glenn Cross, reviewing R. Scott Decker’s book Recounting the Anthrax Attacks: Terror, the Amerithrax Task Force, and the Evolution of Forensics in the FBI (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), writes in War on the Rocks that the anthrax mailings played a crucial role in raising concerns over possible terrorist use of biological agents in attacks against the homeland. As a result of the anthrax scare, Americans’ perceptions of terrorism came to include an existential fear of biological terrorism (aka “bio-doom”). “Though this sense of dread has since diminished in the absence of another biological attack, it persists today because of the recent revolution in biotechnology: a revolution capable of resulting in enormous benefit for humanity as well as catastrophic dangers,” Cross writes.

He continues:

These concerns have fueled enormous growth in federal government spending on biodefense measures, and a cottage industry has arisen to lobby for further resources to combat the bioterror threat. Investments in biodefense have ranged from exponential spending increases and the expansion in the numbers of Bio-Safety Level 3 and 4 laboratories nationwide to the passage of the Bioshield Act in 2004 and the creation of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and Federal Select Agent and Biowatch programs. However, as time passed without a biological attack, concerns about bioterror have diminished and biodefense has arguably become passé, its advocates shifting their attention to health security and pandemic preparedness.