3rd Tabloid Worker Found to Have Anthrax Exposure

A third employee of a Florida tabloid newspaper company has been exposed to anthrax, U.S. and state officials announced Wednesday, saying there is no doubt that the mysterious outbreak was caused by a criminal act.

At the same time, officials said they have found no evidence yet that the outbreak, which has left one person dead, was connected to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, or that anthrax bacteria were present beyond a single building in Florida.

Despite a massive investigation, assembling personnel from the FBI, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Florida agencies, there is still no answer to how the bacteria got into the headquarters of American Media Inc.

“We are now conducting a criminal investigation into this matter,” U.S. Atty. Guy Lewis said at an evening news conference here. “We understand it’s a problem, and we will bring every resource that we have to bear on this problem, and I assure you we will solve it.”

Lewis said investigators still needed to find answers to “three basic questions”: how and when the germs were introduced into the building in western Boca Raton, who was responsible, and most important, why.

Wednesday night, officials said a 35-year-old woman, whom they would not identify, is the third American Media employee to show signs of having contact with the anthrax bacteria. The woman showed no symptoms of the disease, however, and has been put on antibiotics, Florida Health Secretary John Agwunobi said.

Robert Stevens, 63, a photo editor at American Media, died Friday of inhalation anthrax, a rare form of infection that claimed 18 lives in the United States in the 20th century.

A co-worker of Stevens, mail room worker Ernesto Blanco, 73, also breathed in anthrax spores but did not develop the illness, which is nearly always fatal. Family members said Blanco, who was hospitalized for an unrelated case of pneumonia, was recovering and should be released within a week.

With the third exposure case, teams from five FBI field offices, clad in protective garb, redoubled their efforts Wednesday to search the 66,000-square-foot headquarters of American Media, where anthrax had already been detected on the keyboard of Stevens’ computer.

Hector Pesquera, special agent in charge of the bureau’s Miami office, said Wednesday that there was no indication so far the bacteria had been “produced or caused” by the suicide hijackers responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Lewis, however, left open the possibility that clues yet to be found might connect the mysterious appearance of anthrax with the 19 young suspects, many of whom had lived and studied flying in communities around Boca Raton.

With fear, even paranoia, mounting in this upscale city on Florida’s southeast coast, officials stressed that the bacillus had not been detected anywhere outside the headquarters of AMI, which prints the National Enquirer, the Sun, the Weekly News of the World and other popular weeklies.

“All of the evidence to date indicates the anthrax issue we face is limited to the AMI building,” Agwunobi said. He also reminded Florida residents that anthrax is “not a contagious condition”--a sick person cannot infect others.

Because anthrax is not communicable, all three American Media workers must have caught it from the same source, rather than from each other, officials said.

“If this was a massive exposure, there should be lots of people sick. We are not finding that,” Dr. Scott Lillibridge, bioterrorism advisor to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, told a congressional panel in Washington.

To date, more than 1,000 employees and visitors to the AMI building have been tested for possible exposure, officials said. So far, results from 700 of the tests are known, and only one--the 35-year-old woman--has been positive for the presence of anthrax. Results from the remaining tests should be available within two days, officials said.

Along with answering questions about how and when the bacteria got into the building, investigators were also trying to determine which of the many strains of anthrax was involved.

Information about the strain might give clues to where the bacteria originated. Anthrax bacteria, which occur naturally, could have been dug from the ground or taken from a sick animal and cultivated by a knowledgeable person, or else taken from a research laboratory or vaccine company. Most remote is the prospect that the bacteria came from one of the handful of foreign nations that have attempted to turn anthrax into a weapon.

Florida officials confirmed that medical detectives were trying to determine whether the Florida anthrax was the “Ames strain,” which was first isolated in an Iowa laboratory a half-century ago.

That was only one possibility among many, and the CDC said it was premature to draw a conclusion.

Anthrax could be held by thousands of laboratories around the world, some of which conduct research. A much larger number of labs store it to help diagnose the disease in animals or people. At least 400 entities worldwide sell tissues and cells to labs, and many of them are thought to supply various strains of anthrax.

The federal government claims to have the world’s largest database of anthrax strains, which includes samples from weapon programs run by Iraq and the former Soviet Union. But until recently, anthrax samples were traded relatively freely around the world, so tracking the Florida strain could be difficult.

Even in the United States, transfers of anthrax and other pathogens among researchers and commercial entities were largely unregulated until 1996, and the government is unlikely to have records of shipments before that year, several experts said.

Federal rules that took effect in 1996 require laboratories and other entities to register all transfers with the CDC, “and it became immensely more difficult and expensive for anyone who wanted to have pathogens shipped to them,” said Raymond Zilinskas, a bioterrorism expert at California’s Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Dahlburg reported from Florida; Zitner reported from Washington. Times staff writers Marlene Cimons and Eric Lichtblau also contributed to this report.