Health Officials Vigilant for Illness After Sensors Detect Bacteria on Mall

Health Officials Vigilant for Illness After Sensors Detect Bacteria on Mall: "'Our purpose now is to reach into the medical community just to make sure nobody out there has any symptoms,' said Von Roebuck, spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 'There is an incubation window of one to six days, but we still want to get this information into clinicians' hands.'

Health officials in the Washington area were notified Friday that the filters on biohazard sensors that make up the BioWatch network detected the bacteria Sept. 24, when tens of thousands of people were on the Mall for antiwar demonstrations and the National Book Festival."
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"He immediately put out an alert to hospitals, clinics, doctors and pharmacies in the area to be on the lookout for symptoms, which can resemble pneumonia. "The linchpin is that we're still in the incubation window, so we really don't know that there were no cases," he said.

Pane said one theory is that tularemia bacteria, which occur naturally in soil, might have been kicked up by the thousands of feet stomping on the Mall grounds that day."