November 14, 2001
New Findings Point to Anthrax Letter to State Dept.
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
ASHINGTON, Nov. 13 ? New evidence has been found that mail containing anthrax spores was sent last month to the State
Department, which has begun to examine stacks of impounded mail in search of one or more contaminated letters, the department
spokesman said today.
In Atlanta, top officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reiterated their view that mail containing anthrax had probably
been sent to the State Department, and that a department postal worker who contracted inhalation anthrax had most likely not been
infected by cross-contamination from a letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle.
Investigators' success in turning up more mail containing anthrax would improve the likelihood of finding clues that could lead them to
whoever sent the contaminated letters.
The State Department worker, a 59-year-old man who worked at the department's mail processing center in Sterling, Va., became ill with
inhalation anthrax last month. After treatment, he was released from a hospital last Friday.
The State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said today that investigators had found some anthrax spores in eight places in the
Sterling mail center ? at six spots on one mail sorting machine and at one on each of two other sorters.
"We are now proceeding to look at all the mail that we had held up, frozen, sealed off in mail rooms in this building, in annexes and around
the world," Mr. Boucher said.
All the mail at the State Department has been held since Oct. 24, and embassies overseas have been ordered to seal and return to
Washington all mail sent from here in diplomatic pouches since Oct. 11.
So far, the only letter to the government discovered with anthrax spores was the one opened on Oct. 15 in the office of Mr. Daschle, the
Senate majority leader. Germs from that letter could have contaminated other mail.
But Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, director of the disease control centers, and Dr. Stephen M. Ostroff, the centers' chief epidemiologist, told
reporters in a conference call today that they doubted that mail in the Sterling center could have been contaminated with enough bacteria
from the letter to Mr. Daschle to have caused the worker there to become ill.
"Inhalation anthrax," Dr. Koplan said, "requires both aerosolization and some reasonable dose of spores, thought to be many thousand." |
