5th Batch Found in Pill-Tampering Case : Poison: Suspect Sudafed capsules again turn up in Tacoma, Wash., area. Two have died and a third made ill from the contaminated medicine.

A fifth package of Sudafed 12-Hour Capsules was turned over to the FBI in Tacoma, Wash., on Monday after a woman noticed it appeared to have been tampered with in the latest incident in a cyanide-tampering case that has killed two people and injured a third.

Jeff Nesbit, a spokesman for the federal Food and Drug Administration, said the woman had taken two of the 10 capsules in the package before hearing about the nationwide recall of the product.

“She only noticed this today after all of the publicity over the weekend,” Nesbit said. “This reemphasizes the necessity for consumers to look in their medicine cabinets, their purses and their travel bags for Sudafed 12-Hour Capsules and return them.”

The unidentified woman did not become ill and returned the package to the store where she bought it, Nesbit said. The store called the FBI.

The blister pack of capsules had clearly been tampered with even though it appeared intact, said FBI spokesman Dave Thurston.

“It was slightly different in size and did not have the safety bands that the manufacturer would have placed on the capsules prior to putting them in the blister pack,” Thurston said.

Nesbit said the capsules would be analyzed in Washington.

The FDA said earlier Monday that it had examined 10,000 cartons of Sudafed 12-Hour Capsules that have been pulled from retail stores in the Tacoma-Olympia area and had found no evidence of tampering.

The agency was still awaiting test results on a suspicious capsule found by another Tacoma woman. That capsule, found in a blister pack with a lot number identical to those containing capsules taken by the victims, was being analyzed by the FBI to determine if it contains cyanide.

Dean Owen, a spokesman for the Washington state department of health, said that he had dispatched about 60 people to visit 2,000 sites in the three-county area where the victims lived to ensure that all Sudafed capsules have been pulled from the shelves.

“There are some ‘mom and pop’ places that may not have gotten the word (about the recall) through news reports,” he said.

The FDA said that it has received further confirmation of cyanide poisoning in the death of one of the victims, a man from Lacey, Wash. After his death, his body had been cremated and his organs removed for donation. Nesbit said, however, that they had been able to obtain blood samples, which had proved positive for cyanide poisoning.

Evidence of cyanide poisoning already had been found in the body fluids of two of the victims, one of them a woman who survived after her stomach was pumped.

All three had taken Sudafed. Two of the victims collapsed within 10 minutes of taking the product.

Burroughs Wellcome Co., the manufacturer of the capsules, announced a nationwide recall of the product Sunday. All known poisoning incidents were in the Tacoma-Olympia area.

The FDA advised consumers to return Sudafed capsules that carried a lot code of 8U2846 and an expiration date of November 1991--the number found on all the contaminated blister packs.