Floridians Stockpile Anthrax Antibiotics

Investigators in boots and white protective moon suits searched the newspaper offices contaminated by anthrax for more clues Tuesday as edgy South Florida residents stockpiled antibiotics and phoned in dozens of alarms to police and fire departments.

With one employee of the Sun newspaper dead of anthrax and a second testing positive for exposure, officials in this upscale Atlantic Coast city of 75,000 tried to reassure residents that they were in no danger. But druggists in Boca Raton reported an unprecedented boom in sales of the antibiotics used to counter anthrax.

“Yesterday was, I’d say, out-and-out panic,” said Joshua Lubitz, a pharmacist at an Eckerd’s drugstore on North Federal Highway. In a normal week, Lubitz said, he sells 200 of the 500-milligram Cipro tablets, an anthrax antibiotic. On Monday, he filled prescriptions for 2,000 of the white oval pills; among his customers were five doctors who wanted to stockpile for themselves and their families.

In downtown Miami, the Citibank building was evacuated after a mysterious black powder was found, and five people taken to the hospital. In Hollywood, Fla., three employees at a telemarketing firm were hosed down in their business clothes by firefighters after they noticed an unexplained dirt-like powder on boxes.

In no instance was the unidentified substance reported to be anthrax, which can cause fever, coughing, headache, vomiting and chills followed by almost certain death if breathed. But Wayne Bruce, an officer on Hollywood’s fire rescue squad, said, “We’re going to respond to every call as they come down.”

At the White House, President Bush tried to calm the public, saying that although America knows it is dealing with “evil people,” the anthrax death Friday of Sun photo editor Bob Stevens, 63, seemed to be “thus far a very isolated incident.”

“There is a system in place to notify our government . . . in the case of some kind of potential biological incident or chemical incident,” Bush said. “And the system worked. . . . We have, in essence, gone into the building, cleaned the building out, taken all the samples as possible, and are following any trail.”

Frank Penela, spokesman for the Florida Department of Health, said one of the avenues being explored by the FBI-led investigation is the origin of the anthrax that killed Stevens, and that was detected on the editor’s computer keyboard in the Sun’s newsroom.

“We are looking at everything at this point,” Penela said. But he noted that medical researchers would have to contend with the nettlesome fact that the germs, which some countries have tested as a possible biological weapon, occur freely in nature.

“Anthrax is found in the environment--in dirt, in soil, in animal pelts from cows, sheep and goats,” Penela said. In fact, Florida’s last known case, in 1974, occurred when a Jacksonville woman returned from Haiti with a goatskin drum and touched it with a cut finger.

The U.S. government claims the world’s largest database of the genetic “fingerprints” of anthrax strains, with about 1,200 varieties on file at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Finding a match could tell investigators whether the anthrax detected in Boca Raton came from the soil of Texas or Canada or Kazakhstan. It might also suggest whether the Florida bacteria came from a foreign biological-weapons program such as that of Iraq or the former Soviet Union.

According to experts, anthrax is not available to the general public in the United States, but samples are kept in government and private labs for research. Criminals or terrorists could try to steal those cultures, or obtain the bacteria from the tissue of an animal that had died of an anthrax infection. But specialists said that would be difficult.

“I work on the ecology of the disease and the genomics of it--and I still struggle to get it,” said Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University. “If I was Joe Blow, I don’t know how I’d get it.”

At the same time, Hugh-Jones acknowledged that “if somebody has been searching for five or six years, they may get lucky. There’s a network of nuttos out there.”

Dr. Jill Trewhella, who leads the bioscience division at Los Alamos, declined to say Tuesday whether the lab has been called in on the Florida investigation, which includes more than 50 people from the FBI, federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various Florida agencies.

However, Jeanne Guillemin, a Boston College sociology professor and author of a book on anthrax, said, “You have to assume” that Los Alamos is already part of the large-scale inquiry here. Although some terrorism experts fear bacteria from the former Soviet Union’s extensive germ-weapons program may have slipped into the wrong hands, Guillemin warned against “jumping the gun” and assuming the Florida strain originated in a foreign military program.

The second anthrax exposure involved a Sun mail-room employee, Ernesto Blanco, 73, who had the bacteria in his nose, but did not develop the illness. He had already been in the hospital for pneumonia, Florida health officials said, and was reported in stable condition Tuesday.

Late Tuesday, officials said initial lab analysis of samples taken from inside the Sun building and from Stevens’ house in nearby Lantana turned up no further traces of anthrax. “We haven’t received any positive [results] yet,” Penela said.

The FBI, meanwhile, cleared a former summer intern at the National Enquirer, which is owned by the same company as the Sun and shares space in the 66,000-square-foot building. At the end of his internship, Jordan Arizmendi, 23, had sent co-workers an e-mail that, in hindsight, some found potentially threatening. The Florida Atlantic University student said Tuesday he had been making “little jokes.”

Also, Newsweek magazine had reported on its Web site that the Sun’s parent company, American Media Inc., received a bizarre “love letter” to entertainer Jennifer Lopez a week before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The letter reportedly included a “soapy, powdery substance” and a Star of David charm, but Penela, the Florida Health Department spokesman, said Tuesday that investigators believe it has no bearing on the anthrax case.

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Contributing to this report were staff writers Aaron Zitner and Ed Chen in Washington, Charles Ornstein in Los Angeles and researcher Anna N. Virtue in Miami.