New anthrax exposure cases appeared in New York (see GSN, Oct. 15) and in the halls of the U.S. Congress in Washington yesterday.  The new cases have led to U.S. postal workers being placed on high alert, while investigators examine increasing connections between the cases and suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden.

The 7-month-old son of an ABC freelance producer tested positive for the skin version of anthrax yesterday, said ABC News President David Westin.  The baby was being treated with antibiotics and was expected to recover, Westin said.  The baby had been in the ABC News office for a short time Sept. 28, but "it's possible the child was exposed somewhere else," Westin said.  It's unknown if other ABC News employees have been exposed or are at risk.  "If someone had been exposed on the 28th when the child was here, we already would have seen symptoms," Westin said.  "We're assuming the worst and proceeding on that basis to protect the health and well-being of our colleagues" (Stolberg/Mitchell, New York Times, Oct. 16).

Two suspicious letters received at the United Nations last week tested negative for anthrax, said U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard yesterday.  One incident involved a package found in a mail screening room in the U.N headquarters last Thursday.  The other involved a U.N. Development Program staff member who was tested for exposure after opening an envelope Wednesday with suspicious material inside.  The U.N. staff had received guidelines on how to deal with suspicious mail, Eckhard said (U.N. News Service release, Oct. 15).

Washington

A letter that contained a powdery substance that tested positive for anthrax was received yesterday at the office of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), said U.S. Capitol Police spokesman Lt. Dan Nichols.  A preliminary test, conducted by the Capitol police, came back positive, said Nichols.  A second test was then administered, which also came back positive.  Capitol police examined about 40 staff members who were in Daschle's office at the time, who were tested with nasal and clothing swabs and put on antibiotic treatments as a precaution. 

Mail delivery was halted at all U.S. House of Representative and Senate offices, said Nichols, and mail delivery procedures were being reestablished.  Asked when delivery would begin again, Nichols responded, "the best answer I can give you is 'as quickly as possible.'  But I'm not going to put a date on it.  Public safety is what comes first.”  Tours of the Capitol were also suspended indefinitely.  There had been a number of calls regarding suspicious packages at the U.S. Capitol yesterday, but Daschle's office was the only one where any positive test results were found, said Nichols (Federal News Service transcript, Oct. 15).

New security measures were being prepared last week by Congress in the event of an incident such as yesterday's in Daschle's office, the Washington Post reported.  On Friday, a memo sent to Senate offices by Sergeant-At-Arms Alfonso Lenhardt said, "as a result of the ongoing efforts to enhance security, effective immediately mail will undergo additional screening for potentially harmful agents."  Current procedures have Senate mail going to the Capitol police who screen it by X-ray before sending it to the Senate post office where it is screened again visually, according to the memo.  The new regulations will add about another day to delivery, according to Lenhardt.  Members of Congress agreed with the new security measures, which will help protect the staffers who usually open the mail.  "It's not members who open the mail.  It's a bunch of kids," said U.S. Representative Jane Harman (D-Calif.).  "This isn't about members safety.  It's about the safety of young people who didn't sign on to exposure to biohazards" (Lancaster/Eilperin, Washington Post, Oct. 16).

Florida

Ernesto Blanco, the second man to be exposed to anthrax in Florida earlier this month (see GSN, Oct. 9), was diagnosed with inhalation anthrax yesterday.  Blanco had earlier been diagnosed as only having been exposed to the disease.  The infection was likely hidden by the heavy doses of antibiotics given to Blanco early on, said Frederick Southwick, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Florida in Gainesville.  "Once you initiate an antibiotics therapy, then the blood cultures won't be positive.  This situation would make it difficult to diagnose anthrax," said Southwick.  Health officials said they believe Blanco will recover.  "[Blanco's] condition is improving and the public health officials are encouraged by his progress," said the Florida Health Department (Miami Herald, Oct. 16).

Post Offices On Alert

A small amount of anthrax spores were found in the Boca Raton main post office, according to the Florida Health Department.  Spores were found in a sorting area that was restricted to the public and in sorting bins, said Judy Johnson, a local leader of the American Postal Workers Union.  "There's no indication that these spores pose a health risk to workers or visitors.  As an extraordinary precaution, health officials are asking employees to leave this small portion of the building," said the Florida Health Department. 

Investigators are examining the Boca Raton office, which services the American Media Inc. headquarters where the first anthrax exposures occurred and a post office in Trenton, New Jersey, where the letters to Tom Brokaw and Daschle were sent through, according to officials  (Eggen/Thompson, Washington Post, Oct. 16).

The U.S. Postal Service will send out a warning to 135 million U.S. addresses about the threat of biological hazards being sent through the mail, as well as immediately providing gloves and masks to all mail handlers.  The Postal Inspection Service has reassigned most of its 1,900 inspectors and 1,400 postal police officers to the threat and U.S. Postmaster General John Potter announced the formation of a new mail security task force.  The task force will work to secure business mailrooms and post offices, come up with contingency procedures to address biological and chemical hazards and to educate customers and the Postal Service's 800,000 employees on how to handle the threat (Hsu/Nakashima, Washington Post, Oct. 16).  "Make no mistake, we cannot sit back and allow our nation's confidence in the mail to erode," Potter said. 

The Postal Service has also posted guidelines reminding workers to be careful, which comes after mail handling advice issued by the Centers for Disease Control on Friday.  Post office workers are wary of the threat.  "Of course I'm concerned -- why not, with all that's going on," said Jane Niemer, mail services manager at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.  "My concern is because we are a government university and somehow we might be a target," Niemer said.  Before, when powdery substances leaked out of an envelope onto a conveyor belt, people said "what a mess and sent it on the way," said Lori Groen, a postal inspector in Washington, adding, now a few post offices have been evacuated and hazmat teams called.  "We have been asked to turn in everything that looks suspicious," said postal worker Thomas Freeman.  "People are scared to death now" (Seth Borenstein, Knight Ridder Newspapers/RealCities.com, Oct. 16).

Who is Responsible?

Officials are increasingly focusing on suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization as the ringleaders behind the anthrax cases.  "There may be some possible link.  We have no hard data yet but it's clear that Mr. bin Laden is an evil man," said President George W. Bush during a meeting yesterday with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.  "I wouldn't put it past him, but we don't have hard evidence yet," Bush said (Arshad Mohammed, Reuters/RealCities.com, Oct. 15).  National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice echoed Bush's sentiments.  "There isn't any hard evidence of a link of any kind.  But we don't want to be blind to that link," said Rice.

Federal investigators are looking at connections between suspected hijackers in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and places where letters containing anthrax were mailed.  Two of the letters were postmarked from Trenton and several hijackers had lived in New Jersey before boarding a flight from Newark on Sept. 11.  Another letter was sent from Malaysia where Khalid Almihdhar, a pilot on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, was seen in January 2000.  Almihdhar was seen on a surveillance videotape being accompanied to a meeting of suspected members of al-Qaeda, according to the New York Times  (David Johnston, New York Times, Oct. 16).

Other bioterrorism experts agree that the increasing numbers of anthrax cases point to a biological attack.  As the discovery of cases and new locations multiply, the possibility of a conspiracy is a real one, said experts.  “Common things occur commonly.  Uncommon things don’t.  Therefore, when you hear hoofbeats, you commonly think horses, not zebras.  Right now, I’m thinking zebras,” said C.J. Peters, a leading expert on biological warfare and infectious diseases.

Where Could It Come From?

Investigators are looking into possible sources where those responsible could have gotten strains of anthrax used in the cases.  One possible source might be Iraq, said Richard Butler, former head of the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq.  Butler told CNN that it was possible that Mohammed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, might have received samples of anthrax from Iraqi agents during an April meeting in Prague.  Egyptian sources said “they feel that it’s possible that not many months ago that anthrax – a small quantity of it – was handed over in Prague … to Mohammed Atta,” according to Butler.  U.S. officials said that there was no evidence, however, of Iraqi agents giving samples of anthrax to Atta (Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald, Oct. 16).

Russia has also been seen as a potential source for biological and chemical warfare agents but investigators ought to focus on labs in Central Asia, Alexei Yablokov, former head of the ecological security committee of Russia’s Security Council, said today.  “It’s more likely that the bacteria [came] from Kazakhstan or one of the other former Soviet republics, where there were military labs,” Yablokov said (Agence France Presse, Oct. 16). Kazakhstan denied yesterday (see GSN, Oct. 15) any connections between “American citizens’ infection with anthrax and the possibility of the anthrax breed from Kazakhstan falling into the hands of extremists” and said it was meeting its commitments to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction (Associated Press/New York Times, Oct. 16).

Russia offered yesterday to send shipments of anthrax vaccine to help prevent further occurrences, according to the Russian Health Ministry.  “We are ready to supply the United States with vaccines against anthrax if the necessity arises,” said Health Ministry spokeswoman Lyubov Voropayeva.  The Russian anthrax vaccine is different from the U.S. version, said Veniamin Cherkassky, a leading anthrax expert.  The Russian vaccine uses live strands of the disease and is effective for a year, while the U.S. version is chemically based and has to be repeated frequently, said Cherkassky.  In 1992, Cherkassky headed a vaccination campaign in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk, where an anthrax outbreak caused by a leak from a bioweapon plant killed about 70 people.  It would not make sense to conduct such a campaign in the United States, Cherkassky said (Sarah Karush, Associated Press/Salon.com, Oct. 15).

Learning from Past Mistakes

Studies conducted after the Sverdlovsk leak may help researchers here decontaminate the American Media Inc. headquarters, which is believed to be the first U.S. building to be intentionally contaminated with anthrax.  Based on the Sverdlovsk studies, experts believe it is unlikely anyone else could be infected from anthrax spores left behind in the AMI building.  “What we’ve learned is it’s the concentration of particles in the first release that makes it deadly,” said Monica Schoch-Spana, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Study.  “That first aerosol puff or cloud that is released is the most concentrated form,” Schoch-Spana said. 

Two problems that will have to be solved with regard to the AMI building are how to clean the building without damaging the contents and how to assure workers it is safe to return.  In 1996, the Energy Department was asked to come up with an agent to be used to decontaminate civilian buildings in the event of an anthrax outbreak.  “With something like anthrax, high concentrations of bleach or hydrogen peroxide will kill the spores, but they will also ruin the contents of the building,” said Mark Tucker, a chemical engineer for the DOE’s Sandia Laboratory.  A liquid foaming agent call Sandia Easy Decon was invented to kill a number of biological agents, including anthrax.  Two companies have been licensed to manufacture and sell the formula.  Representatives from both have been in contact with Florida authorities about the AMI building, however, “so far we’re told no decisions have been made about what they are going to do there,” said one company representative.

Even if the building is cleaned, a harder task might be persuading workers to return.  “One of the difficulties is even if [you’ve] decontaminated the building, you still have to convince the people who work there it is safe,” said Tucker.  “That’s a difficult thing to do without testing every square inch.”  It would be difficult to accurately test a building, according to experts, because systems to do just that don’t exist.  “Regardless of what the risk is assessed at, people are going to have their own opinion and they are not going to want to go back into that building unless something is done,” Schoch-Spana said (Lisa Arthur, Knight Ridder Newspapers/RealCities.com, Oct. 15).

International Reactions

About 36 people in the eastern republic of Tuva in Russia have been tested for anthrax after coming into contacted with infected animals, according to the Russian newspaper Izvestia.  There have been sporadic cases of anthrax registered in Russia, but none had been seen in humans in Tuva since 1987.  More than 200 cattle were vaccinated against the disease in the Erzinski region, on the Mongolian border, and meat and milk transports were temporarily banned after several animals tested positive for anthrax (Agence France-Presse, Oct. 16).

In the first suspected case of bioterroism in Poland, 11 people have been placed under observation for possible anthrax exposure in Gdansk on Monday after handling suspicious mail sent to Polish police and TV stations.  Eight policeman and three TVP Gdansk employees will remain in the hospital for at least five days and are being treated with antibiotics.  On Sunday, one suspicious letter was delivered to the Gdansk police headquarters.  A similar letter arrived at TVP Gdansk on Monday (Central Europe Online, Oct. 15).

South Korea decided Tuesday to install metal detectors and X-ray machines at post offices to inspect mail amidst bioterrorism fears.  Other measure being taken include stepped-up quarantine and immigration checks at airports and ports, an increase in the antibiotic stockpile, and the placement of an anti-bioterrorism team on around-the-clock alert at the National Institute of Health, said South Korean presidential spokesman Park Joon-Young (Agence France-Presse, Oct. 16).

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