Anthrax Found at NBC Office in N.Y.

An aide to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw has contracted a rare skin form of anthrax, marking the first appearance of the disease outside of Florida since the World Trade Center attacks, federal officials said Friday.

Although the incident has not been linked to the terrorist assaults, it is being investigated as a crime, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said.

Barry Mawn, head of the New York FBI office, said agents are checking potential links to three exposures to anthrax that recently were reported in Boca Raton, Fla. But he noted that “preliminarily, I do not see that. This is a criminal matter and we will go from there.”

Anthrax scares rippled across the nation Friday. In Nevada, state officials revealed that a letter returned from Malaysia to a Microsoft office in Reno initially had tested positive for anthrax, but a second, more comprehensive test came back negative. Results of more testing are expected today.

Elsewhere, reports of possible contamination shut down a Denver post office, a Burbank TV station and a busy street in Oregon--to name just a few examples--eliciting swarms of emergency workers, but turning up no additional cases.

As public concerns mounted in New York, the New York Times and other local media organizations reported their own anthrax scares, and hazardous-materials teams checked out a suspicious substance at the State Department in Washington. And in the first sign that the danger may have spread to U.S. interests overseas, the State Department said Friday that it was investigating the white powdery contents of a piece of mail received at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague.

President Bush urged people to remain calm, but Vice President Dick Cheney, in a television interview, said he suspected the anthrax incidents around the country could be linked to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, though he offered no proof.

“There’s a lot of fear and anxiety out there,” said Dr. Neal Cohen, New York’s health commissioner, voicing concern that too many city residents have been flocking to emergency rooms, worried that they may be developing the symptoms of anthrax. “It’s only making the situation worse, because we have no evidence there is an uptick in exposure here to these agents.”

People Cautioned Not to Panic

Other officials cautioned Americans against panicking and trying to buy up limited supplies of antibiotics such as Cipro, which is used to treat anthrax. “People should not hoard antibiotics,” Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said at a news conference in Washington. “We have enough antibiotics to get to the people who need it.”

Dr. Scott Lillibridge, Thompson’s bioterrorism director, said the nation has enough antibiotics stockpiled to treat 2 million people for two months.

The TV network employee in New York, who is an assistant on the “NBC Nightly News” broadcast, has been treated with antibiotics and is expected to make a full recovery. She reported receiving a letter Sept. 25 filled with a suspicious powder, according to NBC News President Andrew Lack.

FBI officials said the letter, from an anonymous writer, had a postmark from St. Petersburg, Fla. There are “some similarities” between the handwriting in the NBC letter and a suspicious letter received at the New York Times, which also was mailed from St. Petersburg, according to Mawn. Tests on the powder in the NBC letter proved negative, Lack said, but on Friday a skin biopsy came back positive. That prompted NBC to immediately cordon off its third-floor offices in Rockefeller Center so federal investigators could examine the newsroom site for contamination.

Employees were quickly cleared from the area, and Lack said all those who may have come in contact with the substance would be given medical tests for anthrax. Later in the day, as anxious crowds milled around, police removed barriers they had put up near the 70-story building.

“She [the NBC employee] is doing well,” Bush said, speaking at a celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month in the East Room of the White House. “But we’ve got teams on the ground, [including] the Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention in Atlanta], the FBI, who are working closely with local agencies to respond quickly.”

People across the country need to get on with their daily lives, he said, urging public calm, because “we cannot let the terrorists lock our country down.”

Despite reassurances, a key question remained unanswered: How could the NBC employee have tested positive for anthrax, when the powder she came in contact with tested negative? Ashcroft, trying to explain the contradiction, said, “The powder may be the source of the anthrax, but it may not be.”

Dr. Steve Ostroff, with the CDC, added that there was very little of the powdery substance on the NBC letter when it was tested, which may have enabled anthrax to escape detection.

While the anthrax scare reverberated across the United States, it was felt most intensely in New York. The news sent shock waves through a host of media organizations; there were other incidents throughout the city, ranging from reports of a suspicious substance at Nasdaq to a suspicious package at the Empire State Building.

On Friday morning, New York Times reporter Judith Miller opened a letter at her desk that contained a hate-filled message and white powder, which smelled like talcum or baby powder. Miller--who co-wrote “Germs,” a book about the threat of biological warfare--told her co-workers and the incident was reported to police. Authorities retrieved the powder and the air in the newsroom was tested for radioactive and chemical substances. The tests were negative.

Employees in the third-floor newsroom where Miller works were evacuated. By midday the building reopened and most employees, except those near Miller’s desk, returned to work. A spokeswoman said 30 people were tested and were started on preventive antibiotics. Preliminary tests indicated the substance was not anthrax but additional tests were underway.

Meanwhile, CBS and ABC shut down their New York mail rooms after the NBC announcement, although executives at both networks said they had not received any suspicious envelopes. NBC’s sister network MSNBC, which is based in Secaucus, N.J., also closed its mail room. Officials at news organizations across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, issued cautionary warnings to employees about opening suspicious pieces of mail. Later Friday, The Times building was briefly quarantined by the Los Angeles Fire Department after a small quantity of a powdery substance was found in the newsroom. Preliminary tests found no threat.

The State Department on Friday also launched an investigation into a powdery white substance that was found in the correspondence center, which handles congressional mail. The area immediately was quarantined.

This was the second time in a week that the State Department has called in special units to check a white powdery substance. Initial indications on the first powder are that it is not any biological agent, spokesman Richard Boucher said.

As public concerns grew, officials urged people to be cautious about handling particular items of mail. Ken Newman, deputy chief of the U.S. Postal Service, said at a news briefing that people should be on the lookout for unexpected packages, letters sent to someone no longer at the address, letters with no return addresses and oddly shaped packages of unusual weight.

New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who spoke at a news conference with Lack and Mawn, reminded New Yorkers that anthrax is not contagious and only can be contracted through individual exposures.

There are three ways to contract anthrax, a rare bacterial infection: It can enter the body through a cut or lesion in the skin, which is how the NBC employee in New York was infected. Anthrax also can be contracted from contaminated food, and by inhalation--the form of the disease that killed a man in Florida. Antibiotics such as Cipro can prevent the onset of disease and death, but only if they are taken before symptoms appear. Once an individual gets ill from inhaling anthrax, the chances of survival drop substantially.

There were only 18 cases of inhalation anthrax in the United States between 1900 and 1978, according to the CDC. Before this month, the last known human death caused by anthrax in the United States was reported in 1976. The fatality rate for inhalation anthrax is extremely high, 90%, but it is much lower, about 5% to 20%, for untreated skin infections.

At NBC, the letter under suspicion was addressed to Brokaw and first was opened by the news desk, where it was handled by several people, one of whom took it into Brokaw’s assistant--the person who was infected.

An NBC spokeswoman said the letter was a single page, and contained about a tablespoonful of powder. It didn’t have a particular subject, but instead was a general, inflammatory criticism of Brokaw. “Tom gets these letters all the time,” the spokeswoman said.

Only Brokaw’s assistant had an adverse reaction at the time, which an NBC employee described as a rash. Although NBC staffers were buzzing about the unusual letter for a few days after it arrived, they were not concerned, particularly when tests for any hazard came back negative.

“We have no reason to believe that this particular incident has spread beyond this particular employee,” NBC President Robert Wright said with Lack in a joint memo to employees. But they added: “We have heightened security measures even further after events of Sept. 11.”

By the end of the workday, a nervous calm had returned to Rockefeller Center. For some, though, high-level assurances were no longer enough.

“I just don’t want to be handling any mail in this building,” said Joanne Pullan, a Rockefeller Center mail clerk standing uneasily near the building. “We won’t even touch it today. You want to feel safe.”

Mail Service Link to Florida Cases Checked

In Boca Raton, federal officials said Friday that they are probing a “possible link” between mail service and how anthrax spores were introduced inside the headquarters of the tabloid publisher America Media Inc. FBI Special Agent Hector Pesquera said traces of the bacillus have been found in the company’s mail room by investigators, and inside a mail slot or similar “receptacle,” as well as the computer keyboard of Bob Stevens, a 63-year-old American Media photo editor who died last week after breathing anthrax spores.

Another employee of the publishing firm, Ernesto Blanco, 73, who was responsible for picking up the company’s mail at the post office, tested positive for exposure to the bacteria. So did a third, Stephanie Dailey, 36, who also worked in American Media’s first-floor mail room. Neither of them contracted the disease.

This weekend, the FBI plans to conduct more than 800 interviews with employees, family members and visitors to American Media. Agents already have been quizzing employees to see if they have relatives who are scientists--suggesting authorities haven’t ruled out the possibility that a disgruntled worker might be behind Florida’s three anthrax cases.

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Times staff reporters Geraldine Baum and Elizabeth Jensen in New York; Aaron Zitner and Marlene Cimons in Washington; John-Thor Dahlburg in Miami; and Tom Gorman in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

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