Sure, some people did get biten by sharks (many of them were surfers who liked to play in the sharks' feeding grounds) and one or two of them even died. In the meantime, 99.99% of the people had little or nothing to worry about from sharks. To read the "Summer of the Shark" stories, you'd think you were in danger every time you took a bath, despite the fact that the number of attacks was actually lower this year than last. The anthrax stories strike me the same way as last Summer's shark attack stories - a vague random threat that plays on our fears. Hysteria is good for news ratings.

I look at it this way - there are two people living in my house. The odds that someone would send us anthrax in the mail are rather slim. I'm not worried. Some people in high profile targets (news media & government) may need to step up their security. Keep in mind that the US Postal Service delivers over 600 million pieces of mail every day. In the past couple weeks, a handful of letters containing anthrax have been found.

As for the hoaxers, I believe they should be prosecuted beyond the full extent of the law. Every hoax and false alarm stretches emergency response resources even further. These hoaxes are as bad as phoney bomb threats or fire alarms. As the late Mike Royko once wrote about hackers, "Put them in a jail cell with some big hairy guy who'd say something like, 'From now on, you answer to Margaret. Come here, Margaret!'"