Gennady Onishchenko named the cause of a new outbreak of anthrax

“Oh, okay, I’ll drink 100 grams now, sleep, and everything will pass”

The former chief sanitary doctor of the Russian Federation, Gennady Onishchenko, assessed the threat of outbreaks of new foci of anthrax near Voronezh, named the reasons for the spread of the disease and explained “on the fingers” how not to catch a dangerous disease.

Two new outbreaks of anthrax have been identified in Russia, the number of which has grown to four this month. Today, doctors hospitalized seven people from a new outbreak of the disease in the village of Lebedinka, Bogucharsky district, to the infectious diseases department of emergency hospital No. 8 in Voronezh. Two weeks ago, a single case of human anthrax infection was already recorded in the same region. This happened due to cutting up the carcass of a sick cow. Meat with anthrax spores ended up on the market in the center of Voronezh. A local entrepreneur sold an infected cow. Now the breeder is in the hospital in a state of moderate severity.

The governor of the region, by decree of August 22, introduced quarantine near the source of infection and recognized the two-kilometer zone around the store as an epizootic focus. The authorities declared the territory within a radius of 5 km from the unfavorable point of sale of a sick cow a threatened zone, and until November 16 banned people from visiting this market.

“The time comes when quantity turns into quality,” ex-head of Rospotrebnadzor Gennady Onishchenko sums up the event in a conversation with MK. – Nothing bad will happen to patients in Voronezh. Doctors will kill all their personal microflora with antibiotics and cure them of anthrax.

– What is anthrax?

– This is an infectious disease when the bacteria Bacillus anthracis enters the body of an animal or person. The name itself suggests that this disease was first described in Russia and was back in the imperial period under the tsar. My colleagues of those generations discovered it in the Altai region and called it Anthrax. If at that time a person fell ill with it, then almost always it was death. Over time, the disease became less dangerous, we now have antibiotics that we use to treat it.

– How can a person catch anthrax? Explain with your fingers?

– The place where a cow or other animal died is usually registered with us and described. We even have a whole atlas of the so-called. anthrax foci. When the anthrax bacterium finds itself in unfavorable conditions, say on the ground, it instantly becomes a spore. This microbe goes into suspended animation, becomes covered with a crust and can remain in this soil for centuries, nothing will happen to it. As soon as an animal, primarily the same cow, grazes in this territory and nibbles grass and this spore enters the body with it, it instantly comes to life, sheds its “shell” and begins to develop in the body of a warm-blooded animal. The cow begins to get sick. And our peasants clearly understood what it meant for a farmstead to lose a cow—to remain hungry for a year. They urgently slaughtered this cow and ate it. But they knew how to do it – this is already empirical, they cut the cow more finely, boiled the meat well, killing all the microbes, and ate it. All this practice has not changed since tsarist times.

– Anthrax is infected when cutting the carcass of an animal?

“A peasant may have a wound on his hands. He does not watch his nails so often, less often he does a manicure. The pore falls on the chapped hands of a person when it comes into contact with the carcass, which he is butchering, at the site of the introduction of this spore through the wound, a carbuncle appears – a black sore, we call it anthrax carbuncle, after a while the lymph node under his arm becomes inflamed. And if a person is treated with antibiotics in time, he recovers.

And if you start this and don’t consult a doctor, as some people think, “Oh, okay, I’ll drink 100 grams, sleep and everything will go away,” he’ll get sick. The next stage appears – anthrax sepsis, when the microbe penetrates the blood and spreads throughout the body, primarily in the lungs. And if a person dies, then he dies of anthrax pneumonia. In this case, the person has to be treated with massive doses of antibiotics, and even then they may no longer work.

– Why do anthrax diseases occur now?

– Firstly, because they don’t vaccinate livestock against anthrax – veterinarians from Rosselkhoznadzor were banned, my colleagues (specialists from Rospotrebnadzor – editor’s note) were also banned. Now they have turned into angels with wings, if they come to the site, they only convince and tell – inspections are prohibited.

The second factor is negligence. The place where the sick cow fell should be fenced off, described as an anthrax burial ground, and grazing on it should be prohibited. You can’t even let people in there. Because from the lyrical mood there you can pick a blade of grass and brush your teeth with it.

And the third factor. A criminal case must be opened against an entrepreneur who sold a sick cow to a store. But I am sure that this will not happen, because he will turn on the fool.

– Previously, you said that on average up to one hundred cases of anthrax are registered in Russia per year. How big is the threat of spread from four anthrax outbreaks near Voronezh?

– There is such a thing. They usually take place at home. And in industrial production, in my practice, there was a case in 2010, when I caught in St. Petersburg a batch of 800 kg of molded dumplings with the DNA of the anthrax pathogen that came from Omsk.