Anthrax Found on Letter Near Victim’s Home

A trace of anthrax has been found on a letter mailed to a family in Connecticut, not far from the home of a 94-year-old woman who died last week of anthrax, officials said Friday.

State and federal authorities said the amount detected was so tiny that it did little to help explain the death of Ottilie W. Lundgren, but they have not ruled out the possibility of cross-contamination. She was the fifth person to die of anthrax since the bioterrorism attack was launched in September.

No evidence of anthrax has been uncovered in tests of Lundgren’s Oxford, Conn., home, church, beauty parlor and post offices, baffling investigators in their search for an explanation of how an elderly woman who seldom went out was exposed to the deadly bacteria.

Even with the discovery of anthrax contamination on a letter sent to a residence a little more than a mile from where Lundgren lived, federal health officials said they had too little evidence to say she got the disease from her mail.

Authorities offered different explanations of how the letter was discovered.

Connecticut Gov. John Rowland told reporters it was found during an investigation into the death of an 84-year-old man who lived in Seymour, Conn., the town next to Oxford. While the man later proved not to have the disease, Rowland said an examination of mail in neighboring houses allowed investigators to “stumble” onto the letter.

But postal authorities said they provided Connecticut public health officials with the information needed to trace the envelope to its recipient. Postal inspectors said the Seymour letter was one of about 300 postmarked Oct. 9 and processed within seconds of each other by the same mail sorter in New Jersey as the contaminated letters sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.).

Cross-Contamination of Mail a Possibility

The letters were sent to locations throughout the country, but postal officials said, “To date, we are unaware of any public health impacts associated with these letters.”

Rowland told reporters that the number of spores found was “so insignificant that no one who came in contact could have gotten [anthrax] or even become ill.”

He added that no one involved in the investigation believes Lundgren was a target. More likely, he said, she came in contact with another piece of mail that was cross-contaminated, a theory he conceded was unproved.

Federal health officials have conceded that cross-contaminated mail is one possible explanation for Lundgren’s death, particularly since her age may have made her more vulnerable than most people. Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, defended the agency’s earlier statements that cross-contamination did not pose a risk for the more serious inhaled form of the disease.

“I never said it was impossible,” he said. “I still say it is highly unlikely. Things can be highly unlikely but conceivable.”

Koplan added that the CDC still has too little information on the minimum number of spores it might take to infect a person. The research they have relied on for fatal doses was done on monkeys because medical ethics forbid human experimentation on potentially deadly diseases.

New Mail Advisory Called Unwarranted

For the monkeys, 8,000 to 10,000 spores were needed to cause the illness in half of those exposed, the benchmark considered to be a lethal dose in humans. But investigators have had to reconsider how many spores might be needed to cause illness in light of two deaths--those of Lundgren and Kathy T. Nguyen, a 61-year-old New York hospital stockroom worker--that have no known connection to large numbers of anthrax spores.

But Koplan said the discovery of a contaminated letter so close to an unexplained inhalation anthrax death did not warrant a new advisory about handling the mail.

“This kind of evidence makes people nervous, and I would love to be able to say definitively one way or the other,” he said, “but we just don’t have information that makes [us] able to do that.”

Dr. D.A. Henderson, director of public health preparedness for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the significance of the letter was that “there has at last been a trace of anthrax found on something.”

Whether that discovery will prove important to the Lundgren case was unclear, he said. “I don’t think we can go very much beyond that.”

Meanwhile, the FBI still has not opened the Leahy letter, which was discovered three weeks ago in quarantined Capitol Hill mail. Authorities have taken considerable time to devise a strategy to open the envelope, which is believed to contain billions of anthrax spores, in order to retain as many as possible for further testing. Investigators hope the Leahy letter will yield clues in the stymied effort to solve the case.

Crews began work Friday night to decontaminate the Hart Senate Office Building, which has been closed since the Daschle letter was opened there Oct. 15.