IP: BIOTERRORISM: ALTERNATIVE RESPONSES TO EXPOSURE. : What's New for Nov 16, 2001

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

>  The chair of
> the House Government Reform Committee, Dan Burton (R-IN), held a
> hearing Wednesday on how to respond to bio-terrorist attacks.
> Burton can't understand why we don't just treat this stuff with
> alternative medicine (WN 19 Oct 01).  For Burton, this is nothing
> new; in a 1999 hearing on Alternative Medicine his lead witness
> was Jane Seymour, who played Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman on TV (WN
> 12 Feb 99).  This time, however, Stephen Straus, director of the
> National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine was
> testifying, and it wasn't what Burton wanted to hear.  Straus
> questioned "whether the measures that some are promoting do
> anything more than prey upon people's fears and distract them
> from taking more prudent steps to protect themselves...It may not
> even be prudent to combine such natural products with antibiotics
> because of the possibility that they would interfere with proper
> action of the drugs."  Perhaps fearing a backlash, many in the
> alternative medicine industry have issued unprecedented warnings
> to the public not to use their products to treat or cure anthrax.


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