Salon: A Shot in the Dark (Military's mandatory Anthrax shot)

The U.S. military requires troops to take controversial anthrax shots and court-martials them if they refuse. But critics say the vaccine is too dangerous -- and with Saddam's bioweapons nowhere to be found, needless.

This summer, on the first Monday of August, Teresa Colunga was taking a break from her job at the local bakery in Bellville, Texas, a town of 4,000 people 60 miles west of Houston, when a local patrolman approached and told her the police station had received a fax from the Army about her big brother, 20-year-old Zeferino, an American GI serving in Iraq. The note said he had been transferred to a hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where he was being treated.

Shaking with anxiety, Teresa thought back to the letter Zeferino wrote her in May when he first arrived in Kuwait and told her he was fighting a 102-degree fever. "But he never felt much of it. He figured, I'll just beat it," she recalls. "That's the kind of boy my brother was." It wasn't until weeks later that Teresa found out from friends stationed with her brother that for the entire month of July he had complained of chest pains and a swollen spleen and sought medical attention. Army medics, she says, diagnosed him with tonsillitis.

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Teresa asked the policeman to call the hospital in Germany and find out what was wrong. "After he talked to the nurse, he looked at me and said, 'Your brother has cancer, leukemia.' I said, 'There's no way.'" When Teresa relayed the news to her mother, Juanita Colunga fainted on the spot.

Two days later, after contracting pneumonia, Zeferino died from a 105-degree fever, says Teresa.

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After receiving three different explanations for his death (acute leukemia, acute lung injury, and pneumonia), members of the Colunga family are still awaiting their copy of the final autopsy. There are a lot of questions they want to ask. Most of them are about a topic the Army doesn't seem to want to discuss: the series of anthrax vaccination shots Zeferino received right before he was deployed to the Persian Gulf.

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/12/10/anthrax/index.html