Anthrax found at New York governor’s office

By Alan Clendenning

Associated Press

NEW YORK – Anthrax has been discovered in Gov. George Pataki’s Manhattan office, the governor said today.

The anthrax was found in a room used by his State Police security detail, he said.

Tests taken Monday night came back positive this morning, Pataki said.

The governor’s complex of offices on the 38th and 39th floors of a building at 633 Third Ave., between 40th and 41st streets, has been closed for further testing and decontamination. Pataki said the offices would reopen Monday.

No employees in the office have tested positive for anthrax but all of them, including Pataki, will begin taking the antibiotic Cipro as a precaution.

“I feel fine,” Pataki said this morning. “I feel great.”

Pataki spokesman Michael McKeon called the room where the anthrax was discovered a “secure” one that the public does not have access to.

The governor’s aides will use other offices until cleared to return to their suite, Pataki said.

“I think everybody is committed to doing everything we can to make sure the state is run as well as it always has and to respond to this crisis,” Pataki said.

It was the latest in a series of anthrax discoveries in New York City.

About 100 ABC employees were tested for exposure after a 7-month-old boy visiting the newsroom contracted the relatively mild skin form of the disease. Environmental tests were completed at ABC headquarters in New York to try to pinpoint the source, but it could be days before results are known.

The child was hospitalized but has since been released. He is taking antibiotics and is expected to recover.

Three days earlier, authorities announced that a female employee of NBC News was infected with the skin form by a letter carrying anthrax. Letters containing anthrax also were reported in Florida, where a man died of the inhaled form of the disease, and in Washington, D.C., and Nevada.

Network spokesman Todd Polkes said the infant and the baby’s mother, an ABC producer, spent time in newsroom offices while they attended a birthday party last month for an employee.

Those areas were sealed off Tuesday. The two did not visit the studio where ABC’s “World News Tonight” is broadcast, so the network can continue operating there, Polkes said.

The ABC building “is the focus of the investigation but it’s not clear whether that’s where the exposure took place,” said Sandra Mullin, spokeswoman for the city’s health department.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said officials were testing a number of media mailrooms around the city after the tests began Monday. Initial tests of some mailrooms were negative, he said. Among the news organizations tested were The Associated Press, CNN, CBS, Fox, The New York Times, Daily News and New York Post.