GLOBE and MAIL Saturday, October 20, 2001 - Page A19

Forget the Cipro. Just bring me a Valium

By MARGARET WENTE

I got a tip yesterday from someone: If you microwave your mail, you'll zap any pesky anthrax spores. You can also iron it.

The newspapers have been full of tips for identifying suspicious mail. Beware of envelopes with no return address, or packages with too much postage (they don't want to get it back). Blocky, agitated lettering. Anything addressed to J. Lo care of you, or postmarked West Trenton, N.J. Letters that start "Death to America!" are also not good news. If you get one of these, don't shake it, sniff it or lick it.

Most of all, you must remain vigilant yet calm, relaxed yet alert. Everything is under control. Really.

I confess I feel a little left out of the anthrax action.

Maureen Dowd is wearing long black leather gloves to type her columns at The New York Times after a white, powdery substance was delivered to another journalist there. No one here has even hinted that I ought to buy some long black leather gloves. Typical Canadian complacency.

On Thursday, Dan Rather announced that anthrax spores had infected his assistant at CBS. (She didn't miss a day of work.) People joked that he almost seemed relieved. The news anchors at NBC and ABC found their anthrax days ago. The gossip was that CBS was too low in the ratings to bother about.

On Larry King,Mr. Rather showed he's got the right stuff. (Larry King is full of anthrax survivors these days.) He said he's not even taking Cipro! Tom Brokaw is, just as a precautionary measure. No one could miss the message that Dan Rather is braver than Tom Brokaw.

New York Governor George Pataki toured NBC and ABC this week and told everyone not to panic. Don't take the Cipro unless you've actually tested positive for exposure, he said. Then someone from his retinue tracked an anthrax spore back to his office, and guess what? He took the Cipro.

It's not the anthrax that bothers me. It's the alarmed behavior of the guys who keep assuring us that everything's under control.

In Washington, where another anthrax letter showed up, the politicians fled the scene and Congress shut down until next week. House Speaker Dennis Hastert declared that anthrax spores had exploded in a "flume" and spread through the air ducts. House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, defending the decision to desert, declared that anthrax spores can live for a hundred years and replicate themselves. "Wimps!" said the New York Post.

Some news reports said the Washington anthrax was weapons grade, then they said it wasn't. It hardly mattered. In just 10 days, an entire continent has succumbed to a self-induced case of the yips. The authorities are swamped with calls from people reporting white, powdery substances that turn out to be soap flakes, baking powder, Egal, and dandruff. One vigilant citizen in Toronto called the police after sighting a white, powdery substance on a baby change table in a public washroom.

"I will do everything I can to protect my family in case of an attack," wrote Sally Quinn, a rich and famous journalist, in The Washington Post. "I did finally find gas masks available from a place in Salt lake City, where they were stockpiling them for the Olympics. I have stocked up on bottled water, flashlights with batteries and canned goods, and I keep the car filled with gas." She wants her Cipro, and she wants it now.

Some people claim that anthrax panic is a media-induced disease, brought on by watching too much CNN. Maybe so. But we're the generation raised to believe in all sorts of invisible things that can kill you. Lawn chemicals. Electromagnetic fields. Toxic mould. Rare hamburgers. Only last year, 10 tons of tacos were trashed after someone found out they contained a minute amount of genetically modified corn.

"Do you think there are bugs in those woods?" a nervous friend of mine asked me recently. She was worried about West Nile virus. We have about six dangerous mosquitoes in Southern Ontario, and she knew that one of them was out to get her.

The most alarming part about the anthrax story is not how easy it is to spread toxic terror through the mail. It's how easy it is to get your hands on some. In the 1980s, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (the same one that's telling us not to panic) sent an entire menu of germs to Iraq, including botulism, dengue fever and bubonic plague. When Iraq wanted anthrax, it simply ordered some from an outfit called the American Type Culture Collection, which is a sort of non-profit germ library. Until the late 1990s, you could get freeze-dried plague by mail order.

So what about smallpox? Wolf Blitzer asked Senator Joe Lieberman the other night on CNN. The senator, who's also taking Cipro just in case, said lots more smallpox vaccine is on the way. He thinks Osama bin Laden is behind the germ attack and Iraq is helping him. "I want to reassure the American people -- we're ready!" he declared.

Please pass the Valium. I think we're all going to need it. ======================= =======================