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Over the weekend, I caught a cold. Well I think it is a cold. It started with a sore throat, a little fever, some congestion – basically the classic “flu-like symptoms.” Uh-oh. I’ve got anthrax.

Yeah, that’s likely, or so we’re being led to believe. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not disputing any of the theories that say terrorist groups might use biological agents. But I think we might be going a little overboard. The news is full of stories about biological and chemical attacks.

Internet search engines are getting thousands of hits with questions about anthrax and smallpox. And of course, there’s the ever-amusing scenario of people buying all the gas masks in the surplus stores.

“Amusing?” you say. “How can this guy find that amusing?”

I’ll tell you a couple of little known facts. First, this is only my third column, as well as it being my first semester with the Daily. I was intending to “burst” onto the scene with something controversial. You know, some issue to ruffle a lot of feathers and keep the editors dealing with angry letters for weeks. Then Sept. 11 came and everything changed. All those issues that seemed so important lost all their attraction. I wrote my first column about the attacks, and the last piece was also pretty low-key.

So now, it’s been about a month since the attacks, and the military action is underway in Afghanistan. Naturally, that has brought up fears of possible terrorist retaliations.

And that reaction is perfectly logical, seeing how the initial attacks were pretty much unprovoked. But my “amusement” is about the hysteria that seems to have resulted in this situation. And not all of this hysteria is based on fact.

Anthrax is a dangerous disease, but it isn’t contagious. Actually, in U.S. Army tests on monkeys in 1991 and 1999, 18 of 20 vaccinated animals survived a lethal dose of inhaled anthrax, and none of the remaining animals became seriously ill. Effective smallpox vaccines still exist, and the virus is extremely hard to obtain.

So while it is possible, an attack with either of these agents is pretty unlikely.

Even in the event of one of these attacks, you’d be hard-pressed to independently save yourself from the fallouts. In the first place, you’d have to know when the agent is being released in order to have the mask on. Unless of course, you intend to wear the thing around all the time, meaning our city streets would look a lot like a scene out of “Star Wars.”

Even having a mask on all the time might not be enough; a chemical attack is a different story, because you’d also need to have the right filter in, which of course means you’d have to know exactly what the attacker’s toxin of choice is. All this, while there are nations out there which are fairly unstable (e.g. India, Pakistan), and yet have nuclear weapons programs. With corruption and political unrest, nuclear weapons could end up in the wrong hands.

Yes, that could happen. There are also several other doomsday scenarios that could occur. And as we saw on Sept. 11th, we might not know about it in time.

But the fact remains that hysteria won’t save anyone in the event of an attack. If we all run around looking like Boba Fett in our gas masks, and we all pull out of the stock market, and hoard supplies, our society is pretty much screwed anyway.

I’m not trying to say we should all act like everything’s fine and everyone’s happy. We’d all do well to be aware of what the possibilities are.

We can petition our Congress to provide more funding to emergency management and health care agencies. Really, the primary defense against bio-terrorism in the United States is a network of emergency management specialists, hospitals and local health care professionals.

I can’t say for sure that any of that will be effective, but the fact remains that if we let this madness continue, we’ll only make things worse, making it difficult for authorities to detect when something has gone awry.

I don’t really know that there is (to paraphrase Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) a “silver bullet” against biological attacks.

But while I don’t know what the solution is, it should be obvious what the solution isn’t.

Emeka Anyanwu is a senior in electrical engineering from Ames.