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Search is on for another possible anthrax letter

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, November 13, 2001

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Federal officials said Tuesday they believe an anthrax-filled letter that has yet to be found sickened a State Department mail handler, a theory bolstered by traces of anthrax in eight spots in the building where he worked.

The State Department said it would begin hunting through three weeks’ worth of unopened mail to search for a letter that could advance the anthrax investigation.

Test results, Boucher said, "support the theory that there is a letter like the one sent to Senator Daschle that has moved through our mail system." The letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle contained 2 grams of highly concentrated anthrax.

More than two weeks ago, Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it was a virtual certainty that another letter was lurking undiscovered. But on Tuesday, the State Department said it didn’t begin looking sooner for another letter because officials weren’t yet convinced one existed.

For its part, the FBI said it didn’t press for a quicker search because it doubts that a letter will be found even once they start looking, an assumption disputed by both the State Department and the CDC.

No new cases of anthrax infection have been reported for more than two weeks, though traces of the bacteria have continued to turn up.

There was more concern after anthrax was detected in eight spots in the State Department’s Sterling, Va., mail facility. Six of them were on a single automated mail sorter, suggesting that a letter containing a substantial amount of anthrax passed through it, Boucher said Tuesday.

In related developments:

  • The last of six people to survive inhalation anthrax came home Tuesday after 25 days in a suburban Washington, D.C., hospital. Leroy Richmond, a postal worker at the city’s contaminated central facility, said he was grateful to doctors who began treating him for anthrax even before his case was confirmed.

  • With thousands of unscored SAT exams apparently stuck in New Jersey post offices because of the anthrax scare, the New York-based College Board said Tuesday it was contacting high school students and offering them a chance to retake the test or get a refund. The board estimates mail delays held up the answer sheets of as many as 7,800 students out of about 550,000 who took the test Oct. 13.

  • Hundreds of thousands of children’s letters to Santa Claus will be irradiated against anthrax so New Yorkers won’t hesitate to respond to this year’s heart-tugging requests — that might otherwise fit the profile of mail to avoid: strange handwriting, no return address and taped envelopes — the U.S. Postal Service said Tuesday. Each Christmas, the Postal Service in New York makes the Santa letters available to the public in a program called Operation Santa Claus.

  • U.S. Capitol Police have suspended an officer and opened a criminal probe into whether he committed an anthrax hoax by leaving a note and powdery substance in Cannon House Office Building, a spokesman said Tuesday.

    Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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