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Anthrax at the Pentagon, Naval Service Member Under Treatment
WASHINGTON, Nov 5 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Traces of anthrax were found at the Pentagon post office and a U.S. Navy service member whose post box was contaminated was under treatment, a Defense Department official said Monday.
"Anthrax was found when a routine, random test was done by CDC [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] on Friday, October 30 [sic. November 2]," spokesman Rich McGraw said.
The two samples tested positive, the spokesman said.
"The post office was decontaminated on the 4th after contamination was found in two boxes, one belonging to sailor; the other was not assigned," he said.
"The sailor is being tested and receiving appropriate medical care in Bethesda [Maryland] as an outpatient," McGraw added.
A total of 214 mail boxes line the facility that is accessible to both the 23,000-odd Pentagon employees and members of the public, said spokesman Glenn Flood.
A second military post office, which processes the official mail of the armed forces, has also been tested, Flood said, though "samples randomly taken [there] for three weeks have all proved negative."
Eighteen people across the United States have been infected with anthrax. Four have died since October 5, including two postal workers at the Brentwood facility here, where all mail bound for the U.S. Congress is processed.
The Pentagon announcement comes one month after 63-year-old Robert Stevens, who worked for the Sun newspaper in Boca Raton, Florida, died of pulmonary anthrax, the most dangerous form of the infection.
The toll of infected people has since risen to 18 with the latest case a New Jersey woman, who is being treated with the less dangerous skin form of anthrax.
She handled mail sorted at the Hamilton Township mail facility, which processed anthrax-laced letters postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, sent to news organizations in New York and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in Washington.
According to the CDC, she is the eighth person to contract the largely-treatable cutaneous form of the illness. Ten people, including four who have died, have been infected by the more lethal inhalation anthrax.
The list of locations contaminated by anthrax has risen in recent days, and includes City Hall in New York, the mail distribution center in Camden, New Jersey, and the Veterans Hospital in Washington.
In the capital, special teams were preparing the decontamination of a Congressional building still closed following an anthrax attack.
Outside Washington, anthrax has been traced in several other urban centers - Camden, Trenton, New York, Miami and Kansas City, Missouri.
But the mystery that has worried investigators most as they struggle to shut down the spread of the bacteria is the death last week from pulmonary anthrax of Kathy Nguyen, a 61-year-old New York hospital employee with no connection to previous targets of bioterrorism.
Some 100 investigators have examined in detail her movements and have failed to find a clue to her exposure to the disease.
"I mean, one of the things we're concerned about is the release of anthrax in a situation where the aerosolized components could have a wider impact," Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said Sunday.
"So you look where she had been, with whom she had come into contact, and see if there's any indication that there are other cases cropping up. As of now, none. That's the good news. The bad news is that we still have a mystery of how this happened."
According to the FBI, agents have also been tracking the origin of the anthrax-laced letters in New Jersey and have detained Allah Rakha and two people with whom he shares an apartment in Trenton. The three were held on immigration violations and questioned for six hours.
The White House, Department of Defense and the FBI have all stated that the anthrax attacks are believed to have been carried out by a person, or people, living in the United States, perhaps seeking to capitalize on the diversions resulting from the September 11 attacks.
Meanwhile, a preliminary test on a substance found at the U.S. consulate in Lahore, Pakistan has registered positive for the anthrax bacteria, the State Department said Monday.
"There's a preliminary positive test at a local laboratory on something that we found [at the Lahore consulate] on October 30," spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"But the final results of those are still pending from United States testing," he told reporters, noting that other preliminary tests had been incorrect in registering positive for anthrax.
Boucher could not identify what the positive sample had come from but in previous cases involving U.S. diplomatic missions - notably in Lima, Peru and Vilnius, Lithuania -- trace amounts of anthrax was found in or on diplomatic pouches.
Unidentified bacteria found Friday on a diplomatic pouch at the U.S. embassy in Athens, Greece was determined not to be anthrax.
Tests on items in the U.S. embassies in Montevideo, Abidjan and Islamabad have also come back negative for anthrax, Boucher said, adding that results from lab work from about six other diplomatic missions were still pending.
The negative tests, though, mean that anthrax has been confirmed at only two U.S. overseas missions - Peru and Lithuania, pending the results of the Lahore investigation - since the discovery of spores in several State Department mailrooms on October 29.
The diplomatic pouch service was discontinued on October 26 after a worker at an off-site State Department mail facility contracted inhalation anthrax prompting the tests elsewhere.
That worker, Boucher said Monday, continued to show steady improvement and has been discharged from an intensive care unit although he remains in hospital.
In addition, he said decontamination procedures were well underway at all the contaminated sites and that the department expected to resume the pouch service some time next week.
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