New Anthrax Raises New Questions

07/05/2001| IslamWeb

NEW YORK (Islamweb & News Agencies) - A hospital worker lay gravely ill with inhalation anthrax Tuesday as the growing list of victims prompted investigators to worry that the bacteria might be spreading at postal facilities from one piece of mail to another. (Read photo caption below) The 61-year-old New York woman became the first person in the country outside the news media or the Postal Service to be infected with the deadliest form of the disease. A day earlier, a New Jersey woman with a skin infection became the first person in the state with no links to the Postal Service to contract anthrax.
In Washington, where the disease has killed two postal workers, officials shut down two more post offices and planned a two-week decontamination of an anthrax-tainted Senate office building. The postmaster general warned that several billion dollars would be needed to safeguard the nation's mail.
The latest cases spurred worries about ``cross-contamination,'' where a piece of mail picks up spores at a mail facility and infects someone else, said Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health.
Investigators are now asking, ``Did they get infected from a piece of mail that went to their home?'' Fauci said at the White House. ``That is being intensively investigated right now.''
Officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are now keeping an ``open mind'' about cross-contamination, a spokesman said - a stark change from a week earlier.
The latest victims raised the number of confirmed anthrax cases to 17 nationwide since the outbreak began in the first week of October. Ten of the victims have the inhaled form, and three have died. Seven others have less-severe skin infections.
Each development has given authorities another piece of a puzzle as they struggle to understand how the germ spreads and infects, and where it was produced. So far, there has been no indication of where the anthrax came from or who sent it.
The latest cases raise new questions about the potential for infection beyond mail handling, though officials cautioned that no conclusions could yet be drawn.
PHOTO CAPTION:
With the U.S. Capitol in the background, members of the U.S. Marine Corps' Chemical-Biological Incident Response Force, known as CBIRF, are on hand to demonstrate anthrax clean-up techniques during a news conference, Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2001, in Washington. These men have been searching for anthrax in different buildings on Capitol Hill Three congressional office buildings remain closed due to concerns about anthrax. (AP Photo/Kenneth Lambert)