Georgetown Researcher Identifies Anthrax Risk In U.S.

GEORGETOWN, DC – A Georgetown University postdoctoral researcher in the school’s biology department has determined that 1.83 billion people live within high-risk areas for being exposed to anthrax. In the first global survey of its kind, Colin Carlson with Georgetown University serves as first author on the paper published recently in Nature Microbiology. Carlson revealed that rural areas in North America, Africa and Eurasia are at a high risk.

In fact, 63 million livestock owners live in regions must vulnerable to the spore-forming bacterial disease, Georgetown University shared in a release about Carlson’s research. In North America, approximately 39 million livestock, primarily cattle, are raised in anthrax-endemic areas.

“But anthrax is a part of life for farmers and pastoralists on every continent. Our team has been mapping this country by country for over a decade. But this is the first time we can stitch all that together, and see the whole world. For us, that’s very exciting,” Carlson said.

Carlson noted that livestock vaccination and implementing control measures would help minimize the threat to humans. It actually can be eliminated, too.

“In a lot of parts of the world, vaccine coverage is fairly high,” Carlson said in the release. “History plays a big role, like in the former Soviet Union, which had actually eliminated anthrax for a few decades. That helps us understand the world we live in now, and explain why the burden of anthrax is especially high in a few countries.”

Jason Blackburn, senior author on the paper who heads up the Spatial Epidemiology & Ecology Research Laboratory at the University of Florida, noted that while the reported vaccination rates are high in some areas, they aren’t high where the human population at risk is the highest.

“Ultimately, we show that vaccination rates are limited to national reports that are out of sync with populations at risk, but we can’t map vaccination at the same scale as our model,” Blackburn said in the release. “Our model allows us to re-evaluate if vaccination rates are appropriate in areas of highest risk.”

The paper identified an estimated 20,000 to 100,000 cases of anthrax a year worldwide. The majority of cases of anthrax, caused by a bacterium called Bacillius anthracis, involve cutaneous exposure often caused by butchering and eating contaminated meat that is non-fatal, the researchers wrote. The rarer, deadlier cases involve respiratory exposure.