Anthrax dispersal re-examined
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, October 30, 2001
The Boston Globe and associated press
WASHINGTON – U.S. officials, struggling to control a spreading anthrax crisis, admitted Tuesday that a mysterious inhalation anthax case in New York has prompted them to re-examine whether cross-contaminated mail can infect people in their homes or offices.
Officials also revealed for the first time that the anthrax-laced letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle contained 2 grams of the deadly germ – or potentially enough to infect and kill thousands of people or more.
A 61-year-old New York hospital worker – who had no contacts with the news media or the U.S. Postal Service – lay gravely ill with inhalation anthrax on Tuesday, confirmed as the 10th person infected with the deadliest form of the disease.
A day earlier, a New Jersey woman with a skin infection became the first person in the state with no links to the Postal Service to contract anthrax.
Seventeen people nationwide are listed as having been infected with either the skin or inhalation form of anthrax, and three of those have died.
The latest cases spurred worries about cross-contamination, where a piece of mail picks up spores at a mail facility and infects someone else, said Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health.
Investigators are now asking, “Did they get infected from a piece of mail that went to their home?” Fauci said at the White House. “That is being intensively investigated right now.”
Officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are now keeping an “open mind” about cross-contamination, a spokesman said – a stark change from a week earlier.
Last week, Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, the CDC director, said cross-contamination was “highly unlikely to virtually impossible.” On Tuesday, he said it was a “possibility.”
The FBI said it was just now preparing to sort through piles of congressional mail for possible cross-contamination from the letter to Daschle.
Health officials have offered assurances that relatively large numbers of spores are needed for an inhalation infection, citing one report that estimated 8,000 to 10,000 must be inhaled. Another study estimated as few as 2,500. But exactly where the dividing line is remains unclear.
In Washington, D.C., where the disease has killed two postal workers, officials shut down two more post offices and planned a two-week decontamination of an anthrax-tainted Senate office building. The postmaster general warned that it would cost several billion dollars to safeguard the nation’s mail.
Postal and Bush administration officials have been under siege ever since the letter was discovered, and the investigation has turned up few clues, only an increasing number of contaminated sites.
“All Americans are asking themselves a very basic question: Is it safe to open the mail?” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., asked as he began his interrogation of Postmaster General John Potter at a congressional hearing Tuesday.
Trace amounts of anthrax were found at two more post offices near Washington, intensifying the concern that spores had spread from the central Brentwood mail facility. Both the Friendship Station in northwest Washington and the Dulles Station in Virginia showed small, “extremely localized” patches of anthrax, deputy postmaster John Nolan said.
The Daschle letter remains a focus of the investigation due to the large number of victims it appears to have left in its wake. Of the nine confirmed cases of inhalation anthrax so far, six of them have at least a circumstantial connection to the path taken by the Daschle letter.
