Alert over deadly heroin batch laced with anthrax

HEALTH workers and heroin users have been put on alert over the possible circulation of a deadly batch of heroin contaminated with anthrax, which has already claimed seven lives in Scotland.

Drug and medical workers here are concerned, given previous connections between Scotland and Ireland in 2000, when 17 heroin users in Glasgow and eight in Dublin died from the same bad batch of heroin, which was contaminated with clostridium.

There are no reports yet of anthrax-contaminated heroin in Dublin, or elsewhere in Ireland.