The Baltimore Bioterrorism Expert Who Inspired South Korea ’s COVID-19 Response

On Oct. 2, 2001, a 62-year-old photojournalist named Bob Stevens became the first victim of a coordinated series of anthrax attacks to be admitted to hospital. Stevens inhaled the deadly pathogen after opening one of several letters laced with anthrax spores which were mailed to the offices of prominent senators and media outlets across the U.S. Over the next seven weeks, he and four others would die as a result of their exposure. For a shell-shocked nation still reeling from the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history on September 11, it was a disturbing realization that there was a new wave of challenges to American security. In early 2002, President George W. Bush announced $11 billion worth of funding to tackle bioterrorism, initiating a decade-long program to establish action plans for how major cities like New York and Boston would cope in the event of a mass attack. But little did they know that nearly 20 years later, their plans for combating such a hypothetical attack would be utilized on the other side of the globe, inspiring an entire nation’s response to a very different infectious disease outbreak. After all back in 2001, few Americans had heard of bat-borne coronaviruses, least of all Sid Baccam, the Baltimore-based epidemiologist whose ideas for handling an anthrax attack would later be applied by a team of South Korean doctors racing to find a way to control a COVID-19 outbreak that was rapidly spiraling out of control. In the decade followin...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news