From Pandemic To Painkiller? The New Story of Anthrax

By Rishi Ganesh

Hello everyone! After taking a break to focus on my next step in medicine through college applications, I’m glad to be back writing informative articles again! I hope that you enjoyed this piece and continue to read my writing, it’s greatly appreciated!

Pandemics have been a thorn in the side of humanity throughout all of recorded history. From smallpox to polio, the Spanish Flu to today’s COVID-19, pandemics have altered humanity’s progress, for better or worse.

But one disease, at its peak, struck fear into humanity like few others: anthrax.

Even though it didn’t reach the heights of the biggest pandemics in human history, anthrax stands with diseases like Ebola as enigmas that would have devastated the world if they had gotten out. Originating in Ancient Egypt and the Middle East, anthrax is a bacterium that can infect the human body in a multitude of ways, whether ingested, inhaled, or cutaneously taken in. What makes anthrax so scary is that its symptoms vary based on the type of infection route, and inhaled anthrax can be fatal in many cases, as it becomes very difficult to treat. On top of this, these multiple modes of transmission make it very easy to infect people, although person-to-person transmission is rare. However, this transmission difference has allowed anthrax to become the instrument in a terrifying number of bioterrorism attacks, from World War 1 up till 2001, where it was mysteriously and infamously mailed to US Senators and news anchors, causing panic in the political system.

But for all the horrors that anthrax causes, it may be able to provide humanity with far more than it’s taken. With the rise of modern surgery in healthcare, anesthetic has become a common route to issues such as opioid addiction, as prescription pills post-surgery can be addicting and lead to major issues in the lives of those they are prescribed to. Anesthesia also has side effects that can leave patients very disoriented and lead to issues post-surgery. However, in the face of all the issues that anthrax has caused, a group of Harvard researchers strove to try to use the feared disease to solve another problem that plagues the healthcare industry.

Through trials on mice with isolated parts of the toxins generated by anthrax, these researchers have found that anthrax has qualities that allow it to have strong pain-suppressing capabilities, similar to that of anesthesia, while having the potential to eliminate the beginning stages of anesthesia that often contribute to post-surgical problems for patients. Most importantly, the anthrax toxin was able to bond with the pain receptors in a way that could not be done with any of the other structures in the bodies and cells of the mice – allowing it to effectively, cleanly, and precisely suppress pain without delivering the issues of opioid prescription. With its ability to do this, the mice’s body systems weren’t adversely affected either, with heart rate, coordination, and temperature regulation all remaining unaffected by the procedure. This discovery could possibly have huge implications for the surgical field.

Anthrax could become the future of the anesthetic industry.

If anthrax’s effects successfully translate to humans, we could witness a massive decline in non-prescription opioid use, causing an enormous fiscal and societal problem to slowly fade away into the background. It would also open pathways towards using parts of diseases like anthrax towards treatments, and taking the first steps to finding treatment in the very plagues that have hindered humans throughout our 300,000-year history.

Sources: ScienceDaily, CDC