Anthrax Threat Takes a Wider Scope; New Cases Emerge; Some Mail Halted
White House Facility Tainted; Postal Worker Infected in N.J.

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By Neely Tucker and Avram Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 24, 2001; Page A01

The anthrax threat moving through the nation's postal system escalated yesterday as the number of people monitored for infection increased, spores of the bacterium were discovered on mail-sorting equipment that handles packages for the White House and several federal agencies abruptly discontinued mail delivery.

In a day of rapidly unfolding events, government officials again sought to reassure the nation that the mail remains safe, even as they confronted more evidence that the postal system has been effectively used to spread anthrax.

A postal worker in New Jersey was diagnosed with pulmonary anthrax, just one day after two D.C. postal workers died of anthrax and two others were diagnosed as being infected, offering a fatal trail of evidence that a stamped envelope may have been used as a lethal weapon.

"Some 200 billion pieces of mail are sent every year, and until last month, not a single time had anthrax ever been mailed," said Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary. "So what's happened now is, frankly, just as you're seeing in the military a mobilization in Afghanistan, you're also seeing a nation at home mobilize."

In Washington, now host to the most serious outbreak, the main postal facility is shuttered and considered a crime scene, all of the city's 36 neighborhood post offices are being tested for anthrax spores, incoming and outgoing mail at the Brentwood Road processing facility has been quarantined, and delivery has been disrupted in several Zip codes. City officials also moved to prepare a system to deliver antibiotics to wide swaths of the population if contamination is found to be widespread.

Taken together, the steps indicate health officials are considering that the perimeter of the anthrax threat may be far wider than previously believed. The focal point remains Brentwood, which processes all incoming and outgoing mail for the nation's capital, averaging a million pieces a day.

The Postal Service last week hired a company to test the area that handles government mail and processed the one letter known to be contaminated. Results show that 14 of 29 spots have tested positive for anthrax spores. Federal health officials are now testing the entire facility, including the ventilation system.

Three people have died of anthrax in the weeks since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and more than 50 have tested positive in nasal swab tests.

The State Department issued a worldwide caution to Americans abroad yesterday, adding a warning that it cannot exclude the risk of anthrax attacks. "Reports of and confirmed cases of exposure to anthrax have caused an increase in anxiety over possible attacks using chemical and biological agents," the warning read.

Domestically, medical tests yesterday confirmed that inhalation anthrax caused the deaths of two Brentwood postal workers, and a New Jersey postal worker was confirmed as having contracted the same illness. Their two facilities are known to have handled contaminated letters, including one addressed to NBC's Tom Brokaw in New York and another to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.).

D.C. Chief Medical Examiner Jonathan L. Arden concluded yesterday that postal worker Thomas L. Morris Jr., 55, died after the infection spread through his lungs, the chest cavity surrounding his heart and his lymph nodes.

Two other Brentwood workers with anthrax infections are hospitalized in serious but stable condition at Inova Fairfax Hospital. Susan Matcha, an infectious disease specialist and the attending physician for both men, said an aggressive treatment of three antibiotics has kept them stable and breathing without help from ventilators.

Both men have complained of shortness of breath since they were admitted to the hospital, but Matcha said they are able to talk. The conventional medical wisdom had been that inhalational anthrax is almost always fatal, but she said doctors hope to change that.

"It's impossible to make a prognosis because there's so little medical literature to guide us," Matcha said yesterday. "But we are guardedly optimistic."

D.C. Health Department Director Ivan C.A. Walks said at midday that 16 other Brentwood workers scattered across the Washington-Baltimore area are being observed by physicians because they have syndromes that could be precursors to inhalational anthrax. Four of the cases are considered "suspicious," and the patients have been hospitalized, he said. The 12 other cases, including some workers who have not been admitted to a hospital, have been labeled "very low suspicion."

Since anthrax was named as the cause of death for a photo editor at the Sun tabloid in Boca Raton, Fla., anthrax spores have been discovered in the New York offices of NBC, CBS, ABC, the New York Post and the New Jersey mail facility that handled letters sent to those media outlets.

On Capitol Hill, anthrax spores have been found in the Hart building, the mailroom of the Dirksen Senate building, the mailroom at the Ford building, and at an off-site mail-screening center run by the U.S. Capitol Police. Spores also have been detected at the Brentwood processing facility.

An environmental sweep of the Capitol building completed yesterday showed no traces of anthrax, said Lt. Dan Nichols, spokesman for the Capitol Police.

But of all the infected sites, it is Brentwood that is by far the most troubling to investigators.

Rima Khabbaz, deputy director of the viral disease branch of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said scientists were confounded by the shifting understanding of how anthrax works. Before the Brentwood cases of inhalation anthrax, CDC scientists believed none of the other cases suggested that infection was a risk to mail handlers. Earlier evaluations, such as at the P and Half streets SE mail-screening center for the Capitol, were "completely reassuring," Khabbaz said. "The process to define risk is based on environmental sampling."

"The Brentwood situation," she said, "has led us to reevaluate the science."

Greg Poland, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said that although "no envelope is airtight" and any powder inside could be squeezed out in processing, the probability of a significant number of anthrax spores escaping is low.

But given that enough spores were present at Brentwood to infect four workers with the most serious kind of the disease, Poland said spores could conceivably also have passed from terrorist-sent mail to other mail moving through the facility, winding up in the homes and businesses of Washington. "The question is: Is it enough to cause a problem? Who knows?" Poland said.

So far, he said, no anthrax cases have been caused by what he called "collateral mail."

"We have to go with the observed risk, and the observed risk among the end recipients is so far zero," Poland said.

How the two workers who died came down with the disease remains unknown. CDC officials said that they were unsure whether the letter to Daschle caused the contamination at Brentwood or whether spores were relased from other letters.

Deborah Yackley, a postal spokeswoman, said Morris worked in an area at Brentwood that handles only government mail. She could not say where in the facility the other deceased worker, Joseph P. Curseen, 47, was assigned.

One of the other infected Brentwood employees, Leroy Richmond of Stafford, works in an express mail sorting area, according to co-workers. He sorts mail on a conveyer belt and places it in bags depending on the address.

Every day, he and several other postal workers travel to an air mail center near Baltimore-Washington International Airport where they sort express mail headed for Washington.

Richmond then returns to the Brentwood Road facility and sorts express mail arriving from other locations, including Reagan National Airport and Dulles International Airport, co-workers said.

The express mail area is enclosed, and other workers in that area report that neither they nor their colleagues have symptoms of anthrax -- leading them to wonder whether Richmond was exposed in a different part of the facility. Workers say they often are pulled out of the express mail area and assigned to other parts of the post office.

The uncertainty over how the disease is spreading is being reflected in the region's emergency rooms, doctors said yesterday.

After one postal worker went to a hospital over the weekend and was turned away because the staff thought he had the flu, doctors have switched to a very broad definition to decide who should be treated, they said yesterday.

Anyone with flu-like symptoms -- an elevated white blood count, coughs, body aches, respiratory problems -- would be given antibiotics if they work in a high-risk profession or had "credible" exposure to anthrax bacteria. That includes people who work at postal facilities, general mailrooms, media organizations, government offices or Internet companies.

Fears that more poisoned letters may be proliferating was evidenced on several fronts yesterday.

At the White House, Fleischer said a concentration of anthrax spores was detected yesterday afternoon on a piece of mail equipment called a "slitter" at a Secret Service-controlled facility on property shared by the Anacostia Naval Station and Bolling Air Force Base, miles from the Oval Office. Fleischer said no tainted letter has been found at the facility, which processes 40,000 letters a week.

Meanwhile, a sign of the times could be found at the Petworth Post Office at Ninth Street NW, handwritten in black marker on a white piece of paper: "Closed to be tested."

As the day progressed, postal officials chartered buses to continue taking more than 2,000 postal employees to D.C. General Hospital for doses of antibiotics. The treated including D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and his mother, who had visited the sorting rooms of the Brookland and Congress Heights post offices Friday.

Several workers said they were particularly incensed that Daschle's office, and all of Capitol Hill, was shut down after anthrax spores were detected in his office. The facilities that processed the letter, in New Jersey and the District, were kept open.

"Treatment should have started first for those who were handling the mail," said James Coe, a distribution clerk from the post office at 2121 Ward Pl. NW. "Where are the deaths? People handling the mail. Nobody's died in Congress yet."

Among the Brentwood employees in area hospitals with suspicious symptoms is Charles Bragg, 36, of Indian Head, a maintenance worker who cleans various parts of the building. Initial tests indicate that he does not have anthrax, but he said doctors are keeping him at Washington Hospital Center as they await blood test results.

"I had all the symptoms -- runny nose, coughing, headache," said Bragg, who went to the emergency room Monday. "They said since I have the flu-like symptoms, they just decided to keep me in here and put me on antibiotics. . . . Until they give me the final word [about test results], yes, I'm worried."

Staff writers Mike Allen, Justin Blum, Helen Dewar, Manny Fernandez, Carol D. Leonnig, Sylvia Moreno, Matthew Mosk, Michael E. Ruane, Leef Smith, Steve Twomey and Debbi Wilgoren and Metro staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company