Dr. Larry M. Bush  - Bug Hunter

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: About 6:30 a.m. Oct. 2, Dr. Larry Bush, an infectious disease specialist at JFK Memorial Hospital in Atlantis, received a call saying his help was needed with a gravely ill patient.

Esquire: Larry pads into the hospital shortly before eight o'clock.  a slender man with an unruly fringe of wiry hair .. (Dr. Bush is) (a) bug doctor .. a hunter, .. tracking microscopic trophies .. figuring out how to kill them.

Abrams/Bush: Dr. Bush examined a by-then comatose man, interviewed his wife standing at the bedside, and hastened to the laboratory to inspect a Gram-stained sample of his cerebrospinal fluid. 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: When Bush saw the fluid, he found it "grossly cloudy" -- a sign of something other than meningitis.

Dr. Larry M. Bush: I realized then that we might have something very unusual here.

Dr Bush (thought) I've got to make sure this isn't anthrax.

Diagnosis

Dr. Larry M. Bush: When you see rod-shaped bacteria in the spinal fluid, you become particularly concerned. I was .. trying by the process of elimination to determine what they could not be. I was thinking they could be listeria, but they didn't fit the pattern.

NY Times Oct 14 2001: (H)e realized only a handful of rod-shaped bacteria fit the .. shape he was peering at under the microscope. That handful included anthrax. 

Dr Larry M. Bush: I thought, 'Why not anthrax? Right here. Right now.' 

NY Times Oct 14 2001: (W)ithin six hours of examining Mr. Stevens, (1-2pm, Oct 2) Dr. Bush says he was convinced the man had anthrax. 

Dr. Randall Wolff:  We were hesitant to mention the word because of all the implications. I mentioned at the time that, considering the World Trade Center bombing, this bacillus is more likely to be anthrax than two weeks ago.

Bush to Abrams: I've got a guy in the ER and I think he has anthrax. No. I'm pretty sure he has anthrax. Do you know what that means?

Bush/Abrams: Bioterror.

New York Times:  At two o'clock on Tuesday morning, Maureen took him to the emergency room of the John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Palm Beach County. A doctor there thought he might have meningitis. Five hours later, Stevens started having convulsions. 

The fact that anthrax popped into Dr. Bush's mind had not a little to do with recent news reports about two of the September 11th hijackers casing airports around south Florida and inquiring about renting crop-dusting aircraft. Anthrax could be distributed from a small airplane. 

At around four o'clock in the afternoon of Friday, October 5th, he (Stevens) suffered a fatal breathing arrest. 

On Saturday, October 6th, Sherif Zaki and his team of CDC pathologists arrived in West Palm Beach in a chartered jet.