For Cattlemen, Anthrax Just Another Aggravation

Gnarls of mesquite trees dot the plains of southwest Texas. There are cattle here, and goats and sheep. And there is anthrax.

Anthrax is endemic here, an age-old plague like the eagles that snatch newborn lambs or the red ants that bite with a wicked sting. The spores seed this ragged ranch country southwest of San Antonio, lurking in the soil, burrowed by mesquite.

Every so often, the anthrax spores surface. Animals ingest them and, unless they have been vaccinated, they die. The same thing happens now and then across much of the Southwest and Midwest: the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Kansas. Anthrax has killed sporadically for decades, if not centuries, and it will kill sporadically for decades more. This is an aggravation. But it is not cause for alarm.

“We’ve had it here forever,” rancher Carl Hellums says. He bends over the bleached bones of a bull that died of anthrax on his land years back. “I don’t know if it’s ignorance or what, but we’re not overly concerned.”

Hellums had just spent his morning castrating lambs amid clouds of dust so thick he could barely see his boots. That dust could well have contained anthrax spores. He could well have inhaled them. Hellums shrugs. He’s not one to worry. Or rather, he worries about the coyotes that stalk his sheep, about the hard time he’s having finding a ranch hand tough enough for the work. Anthrax? It’s not on his mind.

“It’s just a fact of life around here,” explains Dr. Herman Rathke, a veterinarian.

Another livestock vet, Dr. Cecil Arnim Jr., says, “Nobody’s ever had their nose swabbed.”

There is a world of difference between the clumps of dormant spores in the Texas soil and the concentrated, purified, finely ground particles that have been sent through the mail to lethal effect. Ranchers out here understand the distinction.

Still, they observe the anthrax panic knotting the nation with the been-there, survived-that confidence of cowboys. “Livestock producers who have lived with this for generations know how to deal with it,” explains Dr. Terry Conger, an epidemiologist with the Texas Animal Health Commission.

To be sure, it is possible for humans to get sick from the soil spores.

This summer, a Texas ranch hand developed a nasty lesion after skinning a buffalo in a pasture where several cattle had died of anthrax. By the time doctors figured out the lesion wasn’t just a bad spider bite, the man was so sick he had to spend nine days in the hospital. Antibiotics eventually cured him.

Another case of cutaneous anthrax cropped up in North Dakota a year earlier. The victim contracted the disease while disposing of five anthrax-stricken cows; he apparently had brushed one of his gloves--teeming with spores--against a cut on his face. A month after that case emerged, Minnesota officials announced that two family members who ate hamburgers made from a diseased cow had developed symptoms of gastrointestinal anthrax. Both recovered before the disease could be confirmed.

Inhalation anthrax, however, is all but unheard of on the ranch, because the spores common to U.S. soil are too lumpy to waft airborne and lodge in human lungs. They could be kicked up in dust clouds, but even so, experts say, it’s doubtful there would be enough of them to infect a person. Skin anthrax is a more likely threat, but gloves usually are protection enough. No biohazard suits or Cipro are needed.

Hunting guide Jim Roche explains the Texas perspective: “You have a better chance of getting bit by a rattlesnake or attacked by a rabid coyote out here than you do getting infected by the anthrax.”

If anthrax inspires fear here at all, it’s fear of financial loss. A microbe that can fell a $3,000 bull in hours--without so much as a visible symptom--is a fearsome enemy indeed.

There is a vaccine to prevent such losses; it is inexpensive and extremely effective, although the protection only lasts a year. In regions like southwest Texas, where anthrax spores are seeded thick, most livestock are vaccinated each spring. Yet there’s always some rancher who grows complacent, or forgets, or puts off the vaccines just long enough for an outbreak to flare.

Anthrax in livestock, as in humans, is not infectious. But scientists believe horseflies can spread the disease from animal to animal. And when a stricken animal dies, the billions of bacteria in its blood revert to spores, an exceptionally hardy form. As the carcass rots, the spores reenter the soil, where they can lurk for decades--or infect the next unvaccinated animal to come along.

Veterinarians advise burning anthrax-infected remains to kill off spores. Still, a few dead animals and scattered patches of hot soil can set off an epidemic.

That’s what happened in southwest Texas last summer.

Rancher John Rogers, a burly cowhand from way back, turned into his pasture one June morning to find Old Ben, his favorite rodeo horse, gasping for breath and teeming with hundreds of flies. “It was the first time in my life I had seen anything like it,” he recalls. Rogers phoned his vet, who recommended 30 milliliters of penicillin. A few minutes later, the vet called back to amend the dose. Rogers hurried into the house to fill the syringe. By the time he came back out, Old Ben was dead.

Rogers knew right away it was anthrax, although he never had seen the disease on his land. Within days, he lost three cows as well. Vaccinations saved the rest of his herd, but it turned out that his ranch, in the small town of Montell, was smack in the middle of an epidemic unlike any the region had seen in decades.

Dozens of horses and cattle in five Texas counties died of anthrax, along with a few elk, some water buffalo and even a pet llama. By far the most devastated animals, however, were deer.

Thousands of them died; some ranches reported entire herds wiped out, and they canceled their fall hunts. Hellums says one of his neighbors hired three men to help him dispose of contaminated carcasses--”and all they did for a month was find and burn dead deer.”

Despite the grim memory of that epidemic and the emergence of anthrax as a terrorist weapon, those who draw their livings from the wide-open land here seem unfazed by the spores in the soil. There are bacteria that cause cows to miscarry and there are bacteria that infect sheep muscle and anthrax is, in the end, just another nasty bug.

As Rathke the veterinarian puts it: “It’s just one of the things we have around here. There’s no use becoming alarmed.”

Hellums, proud of his good health at age 68, is proud too that he has not let anthrax scare him. But he has started wearing latex gloves when he works with his animals in a way that will draw blood, such as castrating the young lambs.

“I always have cuts and scratches on my hands, and I got to thinking: if their blood should mingle with mine . . .” Then Hellums gives a good-natured snort of a laugh. “It’s not panic. But there’s no sense inviting trouble.”