New Anthrax Sites Suggest More Letters

Top U.S. health officials said Friday that they now believe there is at least one anthrax-laced letter--and probably several more--yet to be discovered in Washington and that it likely caused the life-threatening illness in a State Department mail worker.

And the White House said that the deadly bacteria mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) this month was developed in a sophisticated medical laboratory but not necessarily one that was state-sponsored.

Friday’s developments, which included the discovery of anthrax contamination in several new locations, suggest that the list of suspects is longer and the number of targets greater than some had believed.

As a result, health officials said they need to test as many as 4,000 additional facilities in Washington--from tiny apartment building mail rooms to private businesses--for contamination and to treat thousands of additional mail workers with anti-anthrax drugs.

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised serious doubts Friday that the State Department employee who is now battling the inhaled form of anthrax could have been infected from mail that came in contact with the Daschle letter.

CDC Director Jeffrey P. Koplan said that “it would be highly unlikely to virtually impossible” for the man to have contracted inhalation anthrax by cross-contamination. “There are probably multiple mailings that have gone out [to] several places in the federal government that have been deemed targets.”

Congress and the State Department both get their mail from the capital’s Brentwood processing facility, the workplace of two postal employees killed by anthrax and two others who are hospitalized with the disease.

No contaminated letter has surfaced at the State Department, though a search continues.

Late Friday, Lt. Dan Nichols, a spokesman for the Capitol Hill Police, said “trace samples” of anthrax had been discovered in three congressional offices on the sixth and seventh floors of the Longworth House Office Building, which has remained closed for testing. The trace amounts were found in the offices of Reps. John Elias Baldacci (D-Maine), Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.), he said.

The Longworth building, which provides office space for dozens of lawmakers, receives mail that is processed by a congressional sorting machine where anthrax previously had been found.

Health officials closed the Supreme Court to the public Friday and began testing the court’s 400 employees after the bacteria were found in an air filter at the court’s off-site mail screening center.

On Monday morning, the justices are expected to hear oral arguments in the U.S. Court of Appeals building a few blocks away. It would mark the first time since the Supreme Court’s grand building opened in 1935 that the justices have been forced to meet elsewhere. No suspicious letters have been found at the high court.

Koplan said that cross-contamination from the Daschle letter might explain the low-level traces of anthrax being detected in a variety of government buildings, including remote mail facilities serving the White House, the Supreme Court and the CIA.

But cross-contamination could not have transferred to the State Department employee enough anthrax spores--more than 8,000--to cause the inhaled form of the disease, he said.

Other government officials cautioned that it is too soon to say whether there is another tainted letter.”That’s the $64,000 question right now,” Homeland Security Director Thomas J. Ridge said on CBS’ “The Early Show.”

Anthrax Testers to Be Vaccinated

In a shift from its previous policy, the CDC said Friday that it will begin to vaccinate 800 employees who work in the nation’s anthrax testing labs, as well as workers who decontaminate sites where there have been confirmed exposures to the bacteria. Those workers are at constant risk for exposure to anthrax.

Previously, when anthrax vaccines were available, they went only to military troops and researchers who regularly handled the bacteria.

A CDC spokesman couldn’t say Friday night when the new vaccinations would begin or from where the supply would come. The nation’s lone anthrax vaccine maker has been idled for three years because of production problems.

Meanwhile, White House officials tried to quell growing speculation among some scientists and lawmakers that the anthrax in the Daschle letter had been chemically treated in such a way that it could only have come from the United States, the former Soviet Union or Iraq.

Some scientists believe that the anthrax in the Daschle letter was coated with a substance known as bentonite, which helps keep the anthrax spores airborne.

But White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the most recent examination of the anthrax sent to Daschle indicates that it “could be produced by a PhD microbiologist and a sophisticated laboratory,” and not necessarily only a foreign government.

The announcement suggested that the anthrax could have come from a range of sources or individuals, and not just from the Soviet Union’s leftover supplies or Iraq’s germ-warfare weapons.

“It’s not the most . . . sophisticated [form] that could be produced,” Fleischer said of the anthrax in the letter opened in Daschle’s office Oct. 15.

He also noted that determining the source of the anthrax will not necessarily prove who sent the letters.

None of 303 White House mail handlers has tested positive for anthrax exposure. Anthrax traces were found this week on a mail-opening machine at a remote facility serving the White House.

President Bush on Friday honored the two Brentwood employees who died of anthrax inhalation this week. “We mourn the loss of the lives of Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen, postal workers who died in the line of duty,” the president said. He offered assurances to postal workers, saying, “We will move quickly to treat and protect workers where positive exposures are found.”

Traces at Mail Sites for Supreme Court, CIA

Traces of anthrax were detected Friday at a neighborhood post office in Washington and at mail facilities for the Supreme Court, CIA and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. The new hot spots prompted health officials to extend the perimeter for anthrax testing, the third such escalation this week.

Now the number of people in the Washington area who should be treated with anti-anthrax drugs could be “astronomical,” said Dr. Patrick Meehan of the CDC. Already, more than 9,000 Washington-area mail workers have received a 10-day course of antibiotics.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday that a second mail handler who was believed to have contracted anthrax had tested negative and was released from the hospital. The first employee remains hospitalized in “guarded but stable condition,” Boucher said.

In New York, controversy continued Friday over the U.S. Postal Service’s decision to close down only a portion of a large Manhattan processing plant where sorting machines have been contaminated with anthrax.

Nearly 15,000 square feet of the building, which employs more than 5,500 workers, have been cordoned off as hazardous material crews clean up the area. But William Smith, a union leader, blasted the government’s decision to keep open the rest of the nearly 2-million-square-foot building.

“They closed down similar offices in Trenton [N.J.] and Washington, D.C.,” he said. “But here they only hand out antibiotics? It makes no sense.” Smith said his union is considering filing a lawsuit to have the Morgan Processing and Distributing Center closed.

So far, no postal worker in New York has tested positive for anthrax.

And on Capitol Hill, workers in hazardous material suits continued to decontaminate congressional office buildings.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) offered an “open letter to the American people” Friday, urging them to be patient with lawmakers’ responses to constituent mail.

Lawmakers have suggested that constituents contact them by e-mail. A list of their e-mail addresses is available at https://www.house.gov.

CDC officials also warned again that Cipro and other antibiotics prescribed for anthrax have potentially serious side effects.

Already, several of the thousands of people being treated with the medications have had adverse reactions, including CDC staff members.

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Bob Drogin, James Gerstenzang, Norman Kempster, Charles Ornstein, David G. Savage and Richard Simon in Washington, and Josh Getlin in New York contributed to this report.