WASHINGTON _ Postal authorities advised Americans to regard their mail as a “threat” Wednesday, began offering protective masks and gloves to every mail handler in the nation and counseled enhanced vigilance by everyone during the anthrax crisis.
Three more postal workers were hospitalized in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington and a possible new case of anthrax was reported at the New York Post, bringing the number of confirmed or strongly suspected cases nationwide to 14.
Three of those people have died. Chastened by events of the past few days, postal officials moved to enhance safety systems, and federal health authorities also took new precautions as they prepared for the worst.
Postal officials said they soon will begin using high-tech equipment to neutralize anthrax spores and will distribute improved masks and gloves to as many as 500,000 postal employees _ nationwide _ who process, sort, deliver or in any way touch mail.
The masks will resemble those worn by firefighters and will feature filters designed to trap 90 percent of all microbes, including anthrax, the postal service said.
On a second anthrax front, federal health officials negotiated a discounted price for 100 million additional tablets of Cipro, the antibiotic most widely employed against anthrax, to protect against an unexpected but theoretically possible future epidemic.
“We’re telling people that there is a threat _ that right now the threat is in the mail,” Postmaster General John Potter said. “There are no guarantees that mail is safe.”
Potter offered this recommendation: “People should do things that are safe and when they handle mail, they should wash their hands.”
The White House later sought to ease such concerns.
“People should feel safe opening their mail,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. “People should also be alert as they proceed, as they open their mail.”
Compared to the U.S. population of 285 million, the number of people infected by anthrax remains small, but authorities conceded that little is known about how the disease is spreading, that they had made mistakes in responding to it and that they could not predict what might happen next.
“We were wrong” not to respond more vigorously to poisoned mail in the Washington area, Surgeon General David Satcher said. Two postal workers died this week from inhaled anthrax.
If bioterrorism continues or escalates, Satcher said, public health authorities might be overwhelmed and compelled to summon private doctors and nurses into national service.
President Bush said no links had been established between the biological terror-by-correspondence and the Sept. 11 terrorist strike on America, but he clearly harbored some suspicions.
“On Sept. 11, this great land came under attack, and is still under attack as we speak,” he said. “Both series of actions are motivated by evil and hate. Both series of actions are meant to disrupt Americans’ way of life. Both series of actions are an attack on our homeland. And both series of actions will not stand.”
More than 7,000 FBI agents are working on the cases, FBI Director Robert Mueller said, but the odds of more terrorist acts remain “very high.”
“This possibility requires all of us to continue walking the fine line of staying alert on the one hand without causing undue alarm on the other hand,” he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which met Wednesday in Washington.
Walking that “fine line,” the federal government and Bayer Corp., which makes Cipro, reached agreement Wednesday for the purchase of 100 million tablets at 95 cents per tablet. The government previously paid $1.77 per tablet.
By January, enough Cipro and other drugs will be available to treat 12 million people simultaneously, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said. Under the contract, he said, 200 million additional tablets of Cipro could be bought at even lower prices.
“This agreement means that a much larger supply of this important pharmaceutical product will be available, if needed,” he said.
The federal government also asked eight companies to submit proposals for producing 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine. Ten companies ended up making proposals, and the first of those doses will be made by the end of November, Thompson said.
Meanwhile, investigators discovered at least two new anthrax “hot spots” in the Hart Senate Office Building, where an anthrax-laced letter reached the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., last week. Anthrax spores were discovered Wednesday in an air-conditioning vent near Daschle’s office and at a nearby mail-carrier entrance to an elevator, but in lower concentrations than earlier finds in the building.
At the New York Post, where an editorial assistant has developed skin anthrax, a mailroom employee developed symptoms “consistent” with skin anthrax, the newspaper reported Wednesday. The employee was taking antibiotics and expected to recover.
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Some good news arrived from the White House, where preliminary tests on 120 workers at a mail processing office several miles away showed that none had been exposed to anthrax. A small concentration of anthrax spores had been discovered on equipment at the office on Bolling Air Force Base.
Nevertheless, about 200 employees at the office and in the White House complex joined thousands of postal workers in Washington, Florida, New York and New Jersey in taking Cipro or other powerful antibiotics _ even without knowing for certain if they had been exposed to anthrax.
Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said Americans “should presume that their mail is overwhelmingly safe” but “everybody needs to be alert because we’re a nation at war.” Particular care must be taken at the White House, he said.
“The White House is a target,” he said. “The White House is not like any other house in America.”
Washington Mayor Anthony Williams, finding his city again on the front line of the home front, told his counterparts from around the nation to gird themselves for challenges they cannot predict or even imagine.
“It’s a war where, certainly in the last week or so here in Washington, D.C., we can’t even see the weapons,” Williams told the visiting group of mayors. “But one thing is clear . . . our cities are under sustained attack like never before. And all of us who head city governments have a new set of challenges.”
A few hours later, postal authorities in Florida said they found a small number of anthrax spores at a fourth post office in Palm Beach County.
The Greenacres facility joins two in Boca Raton and one in Lake Worth in testing positive for the presence of anthrax. Four hundred forty-three postal workers in Florida were advised to take antibiotics.
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Back in Washington, postal inspectors said anthrax was found in 14 widespread locations at the Brentwood Road station that processed an anthrax-laced letter received by Daschle’s office.
In addition, the men with four confirmed anthrax cases worked in three different areas of the building, inspectors said. But those facts do not mean that more than one piece of mail was contaminated, postal inspector Daniel Mihalko said.
Mail has all sorts of tiny particles and debris that fall onto processing machines. When the machines are cleaned with compressed air, anthrax can migrate to many places in a building, he said.
One of the postal workers who died worked in the area of the post office that processed government mail. The other fed mail into bar code machines in a different part of the building. One of two men ill with inhaled anthrax worked in the Express Mail operation.
Thus far, the disease has not been detected on mail delivered to any private homes _ or at any offices other than those specifically targeted by the person or people responsible for the first known burst of biological warfare in the United States.
Those offices include American Media Inc., the South Florida tabloid publisher that employed a photo editor who died from inhaled anthrax, Daschle’s office, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News and the New York Post.
Other reports of anthrax in the United States, Kenya, the Bahamas and in Brazil have turned out to be false alarms.
Postal inspectors trying to solve the mystery of who is sending the anthrax-tainted letters said their investigation has been retarded by concerns over the safety of working with the letters and by a manpower drain caused by bogus reports of anthrax around the country.
“The forensic side of the investigation has slowed at this point because the letters we have that are key pieces of evidence are contaminated,” Mihalko said. “And I’m not sure what the time table is on how they can be decontaminated without destroying other evidence on the envelopes and letters.”
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Experts from the Postal Service and the FBI hope to find fingerprints, DNA from licked envelopes and other key evidence from letters sent to Daschle, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and the New York Post.
But the letters are still at Fort Detrick, an Army laboratory that tested them for the presence of anthrax. The Army says it is aware of investigators’ concerns.
“We are working to preserve evidence,” said Charles Dasey, a spokesman at Fort Detrick. “Our procedures are part of a criminal investigation.”
Meanwhile, a leading anthrax expert told The Miami Herald that DNA fingerprinting of spore samples from the three recovered samples of anthrax showed that all came from the so-called “Ames” strain. That particularly virulent strain was isolated in an Iowa State University lab in Ames, Iowa.
“I am told with the greatest authority that all the isolates associated with Florida, New York and D.C. are identical in all respects and sequence for sequence are the same as Ames,” Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones, an epidemiologist and veterinarian at Louisiana State University, said in an e-mail to The Miami Herald.
The development represents just a small step forward in the investigation because the Ames strain has been widely distributed around the world for experimental use in laboratories.
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(Knight Ridder correspondents Sumana Chatterjee, James Kuhnhenn, Lenny Savino, Seth Borenstein, Kevin Murphy, Lisa Arthur, Alfonso Chardy, Amy Driscoll, Daniel de Vise, Jay Weaver and Maureen Fan contributed to this report.)
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© 2001, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.