U.S. Warns Mail May Not Be Safe

The nation’s top postal official acknowledged Wednesday that he could not guarantee that the U.S. mail is safe and advised all Americans to wash their hands after handling it.

The extraordinary public warning came as another New York Post employee was feared to have contracted skin anthrax and the U.S. Postal Service unveiled new safeguards, including gloves, masks and irradiation machines, to protect employees from anthrax-laden letters.

Meanwhile, a biological weapon expert said Wednesday that the anthrax sent in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) was a higher grade than that sent to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw.

Richard Spertzel, who headed the United Nation’s effort to rid Iraq of biological weapons, said the contents of the letter mailed to Daschle appeared to be weapon-grade anthrax, which would have required highly sophisticated processing techniques to reduce the spores to a very small size to keep them from sticking together, so they would spread quickly through the air.

“The material that went to the NBC Studios in New York . . . is clearly a different product [than] that [which] was seen in Sen. Daschle’s office,” said Spertzel, who has decades of experience studying germ warfare. Twenty-eight people in two Senate offices tested positive for anthrax exposure.

Spertzel said that only three countries appear to have the ability to manufacture weapon-grade anthrax: the United States, Russia and Iraq.

Also late Wednesday, investigators said they found anthrax traces in a new section of the Senate Hart Office Building, raising additional concerns about the path taken by the anthrax-laced letter to Daschle.

Capitol Police said the anthrax was found in a first-floor freight elevator bank on the other side of the building from Daschle’s offices, which are on the fifth and sixth floors. An aide to the senator working in those offices opened a letter containing anthrax spores Oct. 15.

“The tests came back positive for a new, fifth location within the Capitol complex,” said Capitol Police Lt. Dan Nichols.

A local hospital announced Wednesday that it was treating a member of the media who had worked in the Hart building for possible inhalation anthrax. If confirmed, it would mark the first case of a non-postal employee in the nation’s capital with the illness.

Since Oct. 5, anthrax infections have killed three Americans: a photo editor in Florida and two postal workers in the Washington area.

But there were also some promising signs announced Wednesday:

* Ernesto Blanco, a 73-year-old employee of tabloid publisher American Media Inc., was released from a Miami hospital where he had been treated for inhalation anthrax, raising the hopes of health officials that the often-fatal form of the disease can be beat.

* The White House announced that none of the first 120 preliminary test results on about 200 people at its off-site facility and its mail room had indicated exposure to anthrax spores. The tests, expected to be completed today or Friday, were launched after traces of anthrax were found on equipment at a remote mail facility that serves the White House.

* Washington health officials said they no longer suspect anthrax as the cause of illness in four postal workers they had been tracking, an improvement in their status from Tuesday. Officials said that no Washington area patients currently meet the threshold to be considered “suspected” anthrax cases and the 31 postal workers still under observation have a “very low” likelihood of infection.

In the nation’s capital, site of the greatest number of anthrax deaths and cases of inhalation anthrax, the release of Florida’s Blanco from the hospital was heralded as a positive sign after days of grim news.

“The previous belief was that once you got [inhalation anthrax], it was invariably and intractably deadly,” said District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams.

“Today we know a lot more than we knew yesterday,” said Dr. Ivan Walks, the city’s chief health officer. “Today we know a man in Florida with inhalation anthrax went home, and we pray for the same outcome with the two postal workers here.”

More Anthrax Letters May Exist, Public Told

But government officials urged Americans to remain vigilant, warning that additional anthrax letters could still be discovered.

Demonstrating once again that the anthrax scare is taking U.S. officials into uncharted territory, Postmaster General John Potter flatly told Americans that he could not guarantee that their mail is safe.

“We’re telling people that there is a threat--that right now the threat is in the mail,” Potter said in a TV interview.

But he added that there was only a slim chance that Americans’ mail would be contaminated. “People should do things that are safe, and when they handle mail, they should wash their hands,” he said.

In response to the threat, postal officials said Wednesday they would move quickly to distribute masks and gloves to up to 500,000 postal workers nationwide who handle the mail.

Already, protective gear has gone out to areas where anthrax-laced letters are known to have been handled: New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. The gear has also been sent to workers in South Florida, where traces of anthrax were found in several post offices.

Officials hope to install by November special machines nationwide that would detect and kill anthrax and other biological threats.

“We will deploy nationally,” said Deborah Willhite, a senior vice president of the U.S. Postal Service.

In a television interview Wednesday, U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher made one of the strongest admissions yet that government officials moved too slowly in responding to the crisis.

“The fact of the matter is that we were wrong because we haven’t been here before and we’re learning together,” Satcher said.

Since the first anthrax case was reported this month, the Bush administration has been struggling to find the right balance between reassuring the public and preventing new infections.

“It is a new challenge that we’re all facing as a country, and we need to do more,” Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson told U.S. mayors at a national summit on emergency safety and security.

On another front, Thompson confirmed that he has negotiated with German drug maker Bayer Corp. to pay $95 million for “an initial order” of 100 million tablets of Cipro, the widely used antibiotic for anthrax. That will provide the government with enough medication to treat 12 million people, he said. The cost represents a steep discount from the retail price of more than $4 a pill.

The funds for the tablets are included in the $1.6-billion emergency proposal that President Bush sent to Congress on Oct. 17.

Separately, the administration is releasing $3 million immediately through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to supplement public health grants to New York, New Jersey, Florida and Washington, D.C., to detect new anthrax outbreaks.

In some of his lengthiest remarks on the anthrax incidents, Bush presented the mail-borne anthrax attack as another component of the attacks on the United States that began Sept. 11.

“Anybody who puts poison in mail is a terrorist,” Bush said at the Dixie Printing and Packaging Corp. in Glen Burnie, Md., near Baltimore.

He said he had “no direct evidence” of a connection between the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax mailings but suggested that there were some links.

“Both series of actions are motivated by evil and hate. Both series of actions are meant to disrupt Americans’ way of life. Both series of actions are an attack on our homeland. And both series of actions will not stand,” Bush said.

Top U.S. Official Warns of More Attacks

FBI Director Robert Mueller raised the possibility that the anthrax attacks might be related to the widely publicized unspecified threat that U.S. intelligence agencies received two weeks ago, leading U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft to warn about additional terrorist strikes.

“It is conceivable, although there is no evidence necessarily to support it, that the advent of the anthrax attacks is what this source was talking about,” Mueller said. “But I must emphasize, there is no evidence to support the presumption at this point that the anthrax attacks were a result of organized terrorism.”

Investigators continued to focus on letters to Brokaw, the New York Post and Daschle, which the Justice Department made public Tuesday.

The letters to Brokaw and the Post, which proclaimed “This is next” and “Take penicillin now,” appeared to be exact duplicates, experts said.

That fact suggested that one or both of the letters are photocopies, which could have been made in a public place. It also raised the question of whether the sender has made more copies.

“We don’t know how many copies this person made and put into different envelopes,” said Gideon Epstein, former chief forensic document examiner for the U.S. Army and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Spertzel, in an interview with The Times, raised the possibility that the letter sent to Daschle could have been filled with spores abroad, wrapped perhaps in plastic to prevent leakage and smuggled into the United States for mailing.

He said that filling a letter with weapon-grade anthrax is difficult, requiring strict containment procedures. Someone trying to get the tiny spores into the envelope could produce clouds of anthrax if a hand merely was waved over some anthrax on a table.

At the U.S. Capitol, meanwhile, one Senate office building reopened, but officials could not say how long five other House and Senate office buildings would remain closed pending the completion of tests for anthrax.

Many Congressional Offices Remain Closed

Most lawmakers remained unable to get into their offices pending the results of anthrax tests. The staff of Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.) worked from a card table set up in a parking lot.

Despite the disruption, lawmakers took time to attend a somber ceremony to dedicate a “United We Stand” stamp, which depicts the U.S. flag waving in the breeze.

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) proposed that the families of two Washington postal workers who died of inhalation anthrax be included in a compensation fund set up by Congress for victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the CDC and the postmaster general to “retrace your steps to ensure that no one else dies from this scourge.”

Skin Anthrax Case Suspected in N.Y.

In Manhattan, a mail room employee at the New York Post was hospitalized with a skin lesion believed to be an anthrax infection. Tests were underway to confirm the initial diagnosis.

The worker is being treated with antibiotics and is expected to recover, the newspaper said in a statement.

In the District of Columbia, health officials widened the circle of people who they said should immediately begin taking a 10-day cycle of antibiotics. About 170 to 200 large-volume customers who pick up their mail in bulk from Brentwood, the city’s central mail processing facility, should also take the antibiotics, they said.

That group includes mail handlers at the U.S. State Department, although no traces of anthrax have been found there, a spokeswoman said.

At the same time, officials tried to assure postal customers that they were not at risk. Washington’s health chief Walks said Wednesday that tests on the ventilation system at Brentwood showed that no air from the work floor, where traces of anthrax have been found, circulates to the public area of the facility.

“We have not had any reason to think those who get their mail were exposed,” he said. “Those people should not be receiving Cipro.”

*

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Bob Drogin, James Gerstenzang, Norman Kempster, Eric Lichtblau, Jonathan Peterson and Richard Simon in Washington contributed to this report.