I think I did EST somewhere back there. Oops.

I just couldn't help noticing the bias here. As if everything not in the mainstream is just baloney. I don't really know about this theory, and I have more questions than answers after reading this op-ed. But I'm not willing to tell this doctor to stop getting his information out just because I'm challenged by it. It should be subject to intelligent debate on the merits, not on whether it somehow reminds somebody of Uri Geller bending spoons.

What in the world are people defending so angrily? I don't respect any paradigm that explodes just because one guy went on public TV and proposed a new way of looking at disease.

I love your little speech about the disadvantaged journalism grads telling the stories of the disadvantaged someday.

And then there's reality. I was forced out of my $5-an-hour job at a newspaper in the '80s because I had to actually eat sometime and I was told that under no circumstances would I receive a "handout" for wanting to "pontificate" and spread my liberal crap around. Those Welfare Queens needed to get real jobs, and so did I. The reporters who survived that weeding-out process were comfortably middle-class.

The only kids who are graduating to tell the stories of the disadvantaged are trust fund babies and the comfortable.

I was just talking to a scrappy journalist who has managed to survive doing the muckraking thing. He spoke to a young reporter at The Village Voice the other day about his undercover work among children who were kidnapped by the New York City foster care system and then fed to the clinical trials system for "Black Box" AIDS drugs -- when the very reason they were being taken from their parents was that they couldn't handle the side effects of similar drugs. I can't think of a more worthy story of the "disadvantaged."

This young woman (who objects to being called a young woman, by the way, it's so un-PC) at the Voice objects to having to read anything technical or scientific about the flaws in HIV testing among pregnant women. My goodness, imagine having to work for a living instead of just supporting a fantasy-liberal ideology. Imagine having to get one's hands dirty defending the working class.

My friend speculates that the Voice reporter is a trust fund baby. I would be willing to bet that she at least doesn't come from the socioeconomic class of these children and parents. If she did, she would be fighting for this story with every scrap of journalistic ability she had.

You're never going to see the Village Voice cover this story -- except to cover it up so that future generations of trust fund kids can work there and feel good about themselves. Indeed, I never saw Salon cover it, and it's been out there for four years. Lisa Foderaro of The New York Times did a good job of contradicting herself several times to claim that the kids died of AIDS, not drugs that cause constant diarrhea, vomiting and pain. Even City Councilman Bill DeBlasio managed to ignore the December 12 Movement protesting outside his own front door in tony Park Slope, Brooklyn; he probably mistook them for the cleaning people.

This is an easy story to dodge if you've never taken calls from women "praying to Jesus" in their closets when the authorities are coming for their kids. Your social class can keep you at a safe distance.

One of these days I'm going to try to get ahold of the government's "anthrax test" and test my mother's front porch in Michigan for spores. Because about 3% of the soil in North America "tests positive" for anthrax, it's going to start an international incident: The prevailing winds across Mom's porch blow toward Canada.

I don't intend to attack Canada, but neither were the anthrax attacks real. The story originated with an employee of American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer; the headlines were right up there with Elvis sightings, "Baby Born with Beard" and "500 Space Aliens Found in Jungle Graveyard." They ended with a resident of the Bronx presenting at an emergency room with classic symptoms of asthma -- a leading killer in the Bronx. The FBI couldn't find any evidence that this person ever came into contact with anthrax.

What we have here is a classic case of post-9/11 hysteria, in which people would believe anything that resonated with their fear and paranoia. I live in New York City, lived here then too, and it was just surreal. Mothers were stocking the medicine cabinet with Cipro. The New York Press reported that several people fainted on a subway platform after smelling ammonia-like fumes. New Yorkers usually shrug this smell off as urine. But not after 9/11, by golly. People suffered real symptoms; a mass hysteria works that way.

In the post-hysterical era just begun, the government and everyone connected with the anthrax embarrassment has to find a way out. It's telling, though, that they assert that the threat is more evident, not less. Government coverup of a public health threat! Run for the hills!

This story will die a quiet death as soon as everyone gets done posturing, covering their tracks, and calling for investigations that never happen. It's just shameful that the government drove a marginally sane man to suicide over this. Even that will be forgotten.