WASHINGTON, 31 October — The trail of anthrax has widened to more federal buildings here, while a woman in New Jersey has contracted skin anthrax and a New York hospital worker is in serious condition with suspected inhalation anthrax. Traces of anthrax were found yesterday at the US Supreme Court, the State Department and at a building housing the Health and Human Services and the government-owned Voice of America.
Results of tests over the weekend found traces of anthrax in the mail room at the main Supreme Court building in Washington. The Supreme Court justices met at a US district court in the capital, and the main building will remain closed today.
Tests also found traces of anthrax spores in the mailing rooms at the State Department and Agriculture Department Agency. Similar traces were found at a nearby building used by the Food and Drug Administration. Officials quickly ordered hundreds of postal workers already taking preventative medicine to get more antibiotics.
Health officials stressed that there is no evidence that Americans can contact inhalation anthrax — the most lethal form of the disease — from touching mail delivered to their homes. "We believe very strongly that people who received mail in the Washington area are ... essentially at no risk of inhalation anthrax," said Patrick Meehan, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But the US Postal Service announced yesterday that all Washington-bound mail will be diverted to Ohio for sanitation before being delivered. Mail normally processed at Washington’s main Brentwood Post Office is being shipped to Titan Corporation, in Lima, Ohio, where it will kill any bacteria in the mail by using electron beams. Titan was chosen because it has a 20-year history with the Department of Defense. The contract is worth $40 million.
The sanitization system "works much like a television set, where it takes the electricity that goes into the electron gun, and instead of the electrons going on and painting a picture on your screen, it accelerates them to nearly the speed of light, forming a powerful beam," company spokesman Will Williams told journalists yesterday. "When the beam is passed across the product, depending on the dose it either semi-sterilizes or fully sterilizes it."
The process, referred to as irradiation, has been used to sterilize medical equipment for nearly a decade. It recently has been adopted for the sanitation for food. Processed ground beef takes only a fraction of a second, Williams said. Sterilizing mail in bulk will take a few more seconds, but less than a minute.
Also yesterday, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the building he works in had become tainted in the bio-terror attack, which so far has killed three people. He said trace amounts of anthrax were discovered in several sites in the seat of US diplomacy as well as in a diplomatic pouch sent to Peru. The department was decontaminating all of its mail facilities in the United States and in more than 260 US diplomatic missions around the world, he said. However, Boucher stressed that while tests at the headquarters were not complete, the building’s ventilation system had tested negative for anthrax and employees would not be evacuated.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post said yesterday that federal officials had ruled out Iraq as the source of the anthrax spores sent to the New York Post and the offices of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. That anthrax, the officials said, did not contain bentonite — a clay made from volcanic ash that limits static electricity, used by Iraq to allow the spores to become more easily inhaled and therefore be more readily infectious.
