Photo from Jernigan, John A., Stephens, David S., Ashford, David A., Omenaca, Carlos, Topiel, Martin S., Galbraith, Mark, et al. "Bioterrorism-Related Inhalational Anthrax: The First 10 Cases Reported in the United States." Emerging Infectious Diseases. December, 2001.

Anthrax may cause terror, but it isn’t always about terrorism.

France, 1945. Jean Cocteau—surrealist writer/director, sometime opium addict, and friend to modernists like Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein—comes down with a case of "carbuncles" while filming a fairy tale, La Belle et la Bête. The first two spots on his chest seem, he writes in his journal, to be "a result of sunburn and bad mosquito bites." Over the course of the film shoot, Jean Marais (who plays Avenant/the Beast) and Jeannot (the man in the Beast-mask) also come down with these boils and fissures, which require near-daily hospital visits to be irrigated, fumigated, and injected with bacteriophage. Wryly referring to newly de-Nazified France, Cocteau writes to himself, "I know what occupation means...I am occupied by microbes."
The occupier, little did he suspect, was anthrax. The odds a person will be diagnosed with anthrax in a year are 1 in 299,400,000, the same odds a person will die from being stung by a scorpion in a year (1 in 299,400,000).

Cocteau did not die, and neither did Marais or Jeannot. They likely suffered from what is called cutaneous anthrax, taken in through cuts or fissures in the skin. Its main symptom is a painless, black sore. It is the most common and least deadly form of anthrax, accounting for 95% of all human cases. Left untreated it is fatal in approximately 20% of cases.

The other two forms, gastrointestinal and inhalation, are much more severe and deadly. According to the CDC, gastrointestinal anthrax is lethal in 25% to 60% of reported human cases and inhalation anthrax is nearly always lethal. Gastrointestinal anthrax causes nausea, bloody diarrhea, fever, and stomach pain. Inhaled anthrax first shows symptoms similar to a mild cold, but after several days it can lead to shock and dangerous breathing difficulties.

Consider the September 2001 anthrax-letter attacks in the US, in which letters containing brownish or whitish powder were anonymously sent to news offices and senators. Of those exposed to the powder—revealed to be anthrax spores—five died, all of inhalation anthrax.

The bacterium Bacillus anthracis affects animals and humans alike. When dormant, an anthrax bacterium forms a hardy spore that can last for centuries, no matter the environment. Its spores have even been found in Antarctic soil. Animals often accidentally ingest these spores from soil. In most naturally occurring human cases, the infection comes from exposure to spore-bearing animal products: untreated meat, wool, or fur.

Fortunately, it is not terribly easy to contract inhalation anthrax. The spores must be inhaled deeply, all the way into the little air cells of the lungs, and at least 10,000 to 20,000 spores are required for an infection. Furthermore, an anthrax infection can be successfully treated with antibiotics. Vaccines also exist for anthrax, but they are rarely given to anyone other than military personnel.

Since the 1930's, when Japan's biological warfare Unit 731 conducted anthrax tests on Manchurian civilians, many nations have prepared—and prepared for—inhalation-anthrax technology, going so far as, in the USSR's case, to store 100 to 200 tons of the stuff on Vozrozhdeniya Island, in the Aral Sea. However, as of 1972 (in America) and 2002 (in Russia), most major anthrax bioweapon caches have been incinerated. This merely leaves the remote threat of bioterrorism, the 2001 anthrax letters being a case in point.

In a 2006 high school science project, though, 17-year-old Marc Roberge of Pittsburgh proved that letters may be easily decontaminated at home, if need be. Testing the theory that anthrax spores cannot survive above a certain temperature, Roberge discovered (by experimenting with similar, non-anthrax spores) that using a clothes iron to heat a letter to 400º F, for a full five minutes, will eradicate any anthrax spores present. His findings were subsequently published in the Journal of Medical Toxicology.

If only Cocteau had ordered the Beast's hair curled with a hot iron, or straightened. After all, he, Marais, and Jeannot likely got anthrax from spores carried in the costume's fur.