Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — The FBI, criticized for its sluggish response to the widening anthrax crisis, plans to begin testing hundreds of barrels of quarantined government mail today at a Washington-area facility in search of undetected anthrax-laden letters.
As health officials confirmed more traces of anthrax in New York and Washington on Sunday, investigators were hoping that the mail search could produce key leads in a probe that, so far, has yielded few clear breaks.
"We have an enormous amount of mail from Capitol Hill that has to be sorted and examined. We won’t know how significant any of it is until we go in there and see what we find," an FBI official in Washington who asked not to be identified said Sunday.
Tons of undelivered government mail has remained stacked up — quarantined and unexamined since mid-October — as health and law enforcement officials have struggled to respond to the discovery of finely grained anthrax in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
One key question the FBI will seek to answer in this week’s search is whether the single letter to Daschle could have caused widespread exposure to several dozen Capitol Hill employees through cross-contamination — or whether anthrax-laden letters remain undetected.
"There is certainly an argument … that it could have been one letter," Deputy Postmaster John Nolan said Sunday in an appearance on CNN.
Nolan stressed that there have been only three pieces of mail out of the billion handled by the postal service since Sept. 11 that have been confirmed to have carried anthrax. He said it is possible that most of the positive readings in postal facilities in Washington, New Jersey, New York and elsewhere ultimately could be traced to the Daschle letter.
The mail examined by FBI investigators this week ultimately will be decontaminated.
A new anthrax detection was confirmed Sunday in New York City, as traces of anthrax were found on a package containing a videotape that was mailed from NBC to City Hall, according to Sandra Mullin, associate commissioner of the New York Health Department.
"This is not a new anthrax scare. This parcel was probably cross-contaminated by the letter sent to (NBC anchor) Tom Brokaw," Mullin said, referring to the letter mailed to NBC Sept. 18 from Trenton, N.J., that was laced with anthrax.
Meanwhile, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were at the Washington, D.C., Veterans Affairs Medical Center to investigate trace amounts of anthrax found in the mail room, according to Phil Budahn, a spokesman for the center.
The hospital received mail from the Brentwood facility. The positive reading for anthrax was found on only one of 22 swabs taken Oct. 31 from the mail room.
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