Postal Workers Critical of Government Response

Deborah Walker is angry, and she’s not the only one.

She has carried the mail for 16 years. She means to keep on carrying it, even though two of her fellow postal workers are dead and evidence of anthrax contamination in postal facilities seems to grow by the hour.

Yet as Walker looks back over the last eight days, she is deeply troubled. As she and her colleagues here and in New Jersey see it, officials mounted a crash effort to protect members of Congress and their aides but were far less energetic when it came to the faceless workers of the U.S. Postal Service.

“As they say,” Walker said bitterly, “the mail must go on.”

Government officials point out that they faced a problem none had ever seen before. Forced to make decisions on the basis of preliminary and incomplete information, they were torn between the need to protect possible victims and the fear of sowing panic.

Also, the fact that most early cases appeared to be so-called cutaneous, or skin, anthrax may have led officials to underestimate the urgency of the threat.

Nonetheless, the early evidence suggests that officials relied too heavily on what now looks like naively optimistic appraisals of the danger to postal workers and possibly others outside the immediate areas where anthrax letters were found. And workers on the ground say the official response was not always timely, comprehensive or clearly communicated.

Chaos is a hallmark of unforeseen emergency, but what appears to distinguish the response on Capitol Hill from what happened in the postal system is that more than chaos was at work. There was a disturbing pattern:

On the Hill, as concern grew, so did testing and treatment. By contrast, it was almost business as usual for Walker and other postal workers here and in New Jersey.

“They should have had the same treatment,” says John Ford, a local official in the American Postal Workers Union.

Walker says the response on Capitol Hill was notably quicker and more broadly gauged than at postal facilities. She says she “believes with all my heart” that the two postal workers who died this week of what is believed to have been inhalation anthrax would be alive if Postal Service workers had gotten more attention sooner.

In the cold calculus of inhalation anthrax, that may not be true. So remorseless is this bacterium, as distinguished from the less predatory skin anthrax, that experts say 80% or more of victims usually die no matter when the disease is detected or how it is treated.

This much, however, seems true: Workers got little or nothing in the way of guidance and support from supervisors who seemed to have been as much in the dark as they were.

Only on Monday, seven days after the anthrax letter arrived in Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s office, were workers at the Washington postal facility that processed the mail finally told to report to a hospital for testing and treatment.

Not until Tuesday did a general directive go out to area postal workers to report for testing and treatment. And when Walker got to the hospital, she was told there would be no testing. Instead, she and others were given packets of antibiotics and told to go home and await further instructions.

Officials in Washington and elsewhere struggled to respond to the crisis with little knowledge. After all, there had been only one reported inhalation anthrax case in 28 years.

From the beginning, health experts and postal officials saw the threat as an open letter: Only direct contact with the anthrax spores, either by inhaling them or having them fall on the skin, could produce infection, and it was assumed the spores could not escape from a sealed envelope.

Events would ultimately suggest that such faith in the protective power of envelopes was tragically optimistic. But that view, propounded by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shaped government responses for days--especially within the Postal Service.

While Senate staffers lined up for their tests and their dosages of the antibiotic Cipro, postal workers were told not to worry. Not only was the danger to postal workers judged to be low, but health officials were reluctant to authorize massive administration of an antibiotic. All drugs have side effects and prove harmful to some patients. For the federal CDC, preventing needless use of antibiotics has become almost a crusade. Scientists have warned that a public health disaster lies ahead because indiscriminate use of the wonder drugs is fueling the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

“There’s risk in prophylaxis when it’s not necessary,” Dr. Mitchell Cohen of the CDC said at a White House news briefing on Monday. “One of our basic goals is to identify who’s at risk. Previous investigations in Florida and New York did not identify that the postal workers were at risk.”

Anthrax was different from past public health emergencies, both medically and politically, but the CDC’s response was measured, even restrained. That attitude was picked up by many other officials.

There was no response matching the dramatic sight of Capitol Hill staffers lined up for testing.

As late as Tuesday night, in fact, the telephone hotline for members of the American Postal Workers Union talked about the need for workers to wash their hands for three minutes if they thought they had come into contact with dangerous mail. There was no discussion of inhalation or the need to be tested for anthrax or given antibiotics as a preventive measure.

In Washington, official attention was slow to focus on the Brentwood mail distribution facility, where the Daschle letter and all congressional mail passes through on the way to Capitol Hill. Two Brentwood workers this week became Washington’s first two anthrax fatalities.

According to a source familiar with the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the CDC first focused on another postal sorting facility on P Street. All congressional mail is sent there from Brentwood to be separated for the House and Senate. The agency planned to begin testing at Brentwood, but there was less sense of urgency because the first round of test results at the P Street facility did not set off alarms.

As CDC was poised to begin an environmental sweep of Brentwood, additional tests at P Street started to show up positive.

“Simultaneously, one of the gentlemen [postal workers] showed up sick at the hospital late Friday. By the time a diagnosis of inhalation anthrax was made late Saturday, there already was movement made to get people who worked there on antibiotics,” the source said.

In New Jersey, the response to the discovery of anthrax was, if anything, even more deliberate.

Two facilities in New Jersey were involved in anthrax letters sent to Tom Brokaw at NBC, the New York Post and Sen. Daschle.

The letters were apparently picked up by a route woman, taken to the small West Trenton branch post office, then trucked to the huge processing center in Hamilton Township. Two postal workers now diagnosed with skin anthrax had developed symptoms and gone to their personal doctors by late September. They were put on antibiotics, though not diagnosed as having anthrax.

When doctors treating the two workers saw news reports of anthrax in the Brokaw letter on Oct. 13, they notified the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. The health department performed tests on the two workers that, after some false negative results, confirmed anthrax in both.

It all took time. Meanwhile, officials were trying to avoid panic. The girlfriend of a fellow postal employee at the Hamilton Township center who tested positive for skin anthrax told the Trenton Times that when she began telling other workers about her boyfriend’s illness, supervisors warned her to keep quiet.

Only three days later, with confirmation of the anthrax diagnosis, was the Hamilton Township center closed for environmental testing. Postal employees were told they could use sick time or vacation leave, stay out without pay or report to work at other area post offices.

Postal authorities learned the next day, Friday, that three postal workers at Hamilton Township had tested positive for skin anthrax. The health department said all workers at the Hamilton Township distribution center should see their doctor and begin a seven-day precautionary course of Cipro, the antibiotic approved for treatment of anthrax.

Friday evening, a fourth Hamilton Township postal worker, a female mail clerk, checked into a local hospital and tested positive for inhalation anthrax, said health department spokesman David Jamieson.

Meanwhile, there was confusion among the postal rank-and-file about the health directives. On Friday, at the insistence of local politicians, testing for anthrax exposure--still described as “voluntary”--was made available. More than 300 workers showed up the next day, nearly all under the impression that the testing and treatment were just a precaution.

Many workers were angry and fearful. Complaints were rampant that postal authorities had done little to explain the situation or tell employees what steps to take to protect themselves. On Tuesday, as the evidence grew steadily more ominous, officials in New Jersey decided to increase the recommended dosage of Cipro from seven days to 10.

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Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Marlene Cimons, Megan Garvey, Robert A. Rosenblatt and Marisa Schultz.