IT IS the classic bioterror nightmare – tonnes of lethal anthrax spores dumped on a city. So scary in fact, that last month the US government announced a $877 million contract for VaxGen, a small Californian company, to make a stockpile of 75 million doses of a vaccine that has not yet been fully tested or licensed.
But Ron Brookmeyer of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore says vaccination might be of little use after an anthrax attack (Nature, vol 432, p 901). His statistical model reveals that simply giving antibiotics as soon as possible would work best – preventing up to…
