Night of Two Town Meetings

riving south through Connecticut's Naugatuck River Valley brought back memories. My dad used to drive this road to and from work 30 years ago, when the river was actually more polluted but the circumstances were less complicated. On this night, a week after Thanksgiving, the fog seemed inseparable from the road. We were looking for Derby High School, site of our first town meeting. The high school was not far from the hospital where the day before Thanksgiv-ing a 94-year-old woman from nearby Oxford had died of intentionally released inhalational anthrax. As we pulled into the parking lot, more memories rushed into my mind—I came to this high school with my school's crosscountry team back in 1970 to run a race. The 1970s seem so long ago—smallpox had been eradicated from the world, anthrax was a rare disease called woolsorters' disease, and the twin towers graced the New York City skyline. In those days, we would be visiting the 94-year-old Oxford woman to study the secrets of her longevity, to see how she had managed to beat life expectancy rates and survive to ripe old age. As our public health team made its way into the building, we were practically run over by a group of students using the hallway as an indoor track. I had to smile—I got my first shin splints running down school halls myself. Besides, it was heartening to see normal school activity in our changed world of post– September 11. The local health director introduced me as the first of the evening's speakers to the town officials, legislators, first responders, and a score of townspeople who had braved the foggy evening to attend the meeting. In spite of the bright lights, a different kind of fog hung heavily inside the building. As I approached the podium, I felt the expectations of the people in the audience. They needed specific, practical, information about their predicament as a small community in the middle of a disease outbreak caused by bioterrorism. I had been to many town meetings before, but this meeting was different. In my public health career until now, disease outbreaks had been natural events. Investigators and the community had a defined enemy, a disease. Now, the disease was only part of the problem. Someone had intentionally created this outbreak, and while we knew how to go after viruses and bacteria, we knew little about human …