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Anthrax Scare Spreads to CIA and Supreme Court
WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Traces of anthrax spores have been found at a Central Intelligence Agency building outside Washington and in an air filter at an off-site mail handling facility serving the U.S. Supreme Court, officials said Friday.
Approximately 400 people work in the Supreme Court mail facility building, located "several miles" (kilometers) from the Supreme Court building, itself located on Capitol Hill, according to Capitol Hill physician John Eisold and court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.
"We're making the assumption that quite possibly something may have come to the mailroom here," Eisold said of the Supreme Court building.
"No court personnel has showed any signs of being exposed to anthrax," Arberg said.
The Supreme Court has now been closed for site tests. If it is still closed Monday the court will sit at Washington DC District Court, the spokeswoman said.
Eisold could not comment on how much had been detected or what kind of anthrax it was, and would not say whether the nine Supreme Court justices had yet been tested.
The air filter was removed for testing Monday and results of those tests by the U.S. Navy were returned Friday, the officials said.
The CIA said in a statement Thursday that the anthrax traces were found in the material inspection facility, a building on the Langley, Virginia compound that handles mail for the U.S. agency.
The agency said samples were taken of 31 surfaces at the facility and that 30 came up negative but that one revealed traces of anthrax.
It said no CIA personnel had shown any signs of being exposed to or developing any form of anthrax.
CIA spokesman Tom Crispell said the building had been closed and that employees had been moved to other locations.
Tom Ridge, the head of the Office of Homeland Security, said earlier that preliminary determinations show the amount of bacteria is "medically insignificant".
No suspicious package or letter had been found thus far at the facility, Ridge said on NBC television.
The State Department announced Thursday that a worker at a remote department mail sorting facility tested positive for anthrax, the first indication that the bacteria has spread beyond the Brentwood mail depot in Washington and the U.S. Congress.
Officials said mail to the CIA may also have passed through Brentwood and that CIA mail may have had incidental contact with contaminated letters.
It was not clear early Friday whether that meant more anthrax-laced letters were circulating in the mail system, or if a single letter had contaminated other pieces of mail.
A letter containing anthrax was found on October 15 in U.S. Senate Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office.
"Right now we haven't drawn any conclusions as to whether it's one letter or multiple letters," Ridge said.
The top priority for the government is to scour government buildings for traces of the sometimes-deadly bacteria, and give preventative medicine to anyone who might have been exposed to it, he said.
"The first thing we're trying to do is determine whether or not these areas are contaminated. If they are contaminated, determine if they are medically significant. And if it's medically significant, treat the potential victims first, and then follow the chain of evidence where it may lead us."
Meanwhile, a second NBC employee in New York has been diagnosed with skin anthrax after handling a contaminated letter sent to news anchor Tom Brokaw last month, officials said, the BBC reported.
In Washington, a postal worker for the U.S. State Department has tested positive for inhalation anthrax - the most dangerous form of the disease, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
In a related story, at least 15 people have contracted anthrax in central Zimbabwe, the state-run
Herald reported Friday, apparently after butchering infected cows, AFP reported.
Anthrax - which has spread fear through the United States because of its use as a biological weapon - periodically breaks out in Zimbabwe, where it can naturally spread from cattle to people.
The former white-minority government in colonial Rhodesia has been accused of using the deadly disease as a weapon in the liberation war. The disease killed more than 10,000 people during the war in the1970s, according to estimates by scientists, AFP reported.
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