[ALBSA-Info] NYTimes.com Article: 22 in Daschle Office Reported to Test Positive for Anthrax

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22 in Daschle Office Reported to Test Positive for Anthrax

October 17, 2001 

By DAVID JOHNSTON and ALISON MITCHELL


 

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 - Government officials said today that
nearly two dozen people in the office of the Senate
majority leader had tested positive for exposure to
anthrax. 

In response to the news, House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert
said this morning that the House of Representatives would
shut down after today's business and would be in recess
until Tuesday to allow authorities to sweep the Capitol for
anthrax contamination. 

Mr. Hastert also confirmed that 22 employees in the Capitol
Hill office of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the
majority leader, had contracted anthrax. The Associated
Press, which broke the news of the positive test results,
said that all of those affected were taking the antibiotic
Cipro. 

Government officials said on Tuesday that the anthrax
mailed to Mr. Dashchle's office was pure and highly
refined, consisting of particles so tiny that they could
spread through the air without detection. 

The officials said the potent grade of highly concentrated
anthrax found in the letter could have been made by an
expert capable of producing large amounts of it, although
it is not yet known who may have manufactured or purchased
the anthrax sent to the senator. 

The letter, which was opened on Monday morning in Mr.
Daschle's office, bore strong similarities in language and
handwriting to the one sent to the NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw
in New York, and appeared to have been composed by the same
person. Officials stopped short of explicitly linking the
attacks to international terrorism, but the gravity of the
threat instantly transformed the investigation into a major
national security concern. 

"We were told it was a very strong form of anthrax, a very
potent form of anthrax which clearly was produced by
someone who knew what he or she was doing," Mr. Daschle
said after a briefing for senators by the F.B.I. and an
Army epidemiologist. He said that the sample that had been
mailed to him "had a fairly significant degree of
concentration of spores." 

Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine said the strain was "very
refined, very pure." 

Heightened concern over the purity and concentration of the
anthrax came as a knowledgeable Congressional official said
that there had been some intelligence warnings last week
that packages would be sent to important places and people.


President Bush was scheduled to fly to California today, a
one-day stop on his way to an economic summit in China.
White House officials said that the trip was still on "as
of now," and that Mr. Bush was waiting for final test
results on the anthrax found in the Senate. His trip could
be curtailed if necessary, the officials said. 

Former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, Mr. Bush's new chief
of domestic security, met at the White House with senior
federal law enforcement and health officials on Tuesday. In
an interview with Mr. Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News, Mr.
Ridge called the threat of bioterrorism "the No. 1 priority
this week and for the weeks ahead," and suggested it was
time to build up supplies of smallpox vaccine and resume
vaccinations of children that stopped three decades ago. 

The initial findings from an Army medical laboratory at
Fort Detrick, Md., came as the police at the Capitol shut
down a full 8-story wing of the office building where the
letter was found, including the suites of 12 senators with
the same ventilation system. Hundreds of people who so much
as passed through the corridors near Mr. Daschle's office
were being tested and treated. 

A senior government official said Tuesday night that the
anthrax in Mr. Daschle's office was "very highly refined,
very small anthrax" and was "the kind that will give you
pulmonary anthrax." 

Officials said they had not yet determined whether the
anthrax which had infected the son of an ABC News producer
in New York was the same as that sent to Mr. Daschle. They
said the material sent to Mr. Brokaw was very similar to
the kind of Anthrax that killed a photo editor at American
Media Inc., a tabloid publisher in Florida. The German drug
company that makes the antibiotic Cipro said on Tuesday
that it was tripling production of the drug as public fears
about anthrax mount. 

But Bayer A.G., the maker of Cipro, acknowledged that even
that increase may not be sufficient to meet demand. Cipro
is the only drug approved to treat inhaled anthrax, and on
Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G.
Thompson said the government wanted to increase the
national stockpile of emergency drugs to have enough to
treat 12 million people for 60 days, six times the current
stockpile. 

Much remained unclear, including above all who might be
responsible for the letters sent to the Senate and NBC, or
what links they had to other cases of anthrax exposure in
the last two weeks. 

A senior government official said that laboratory tests had
not matched the anthrax samples in the two letters, but
that he expected they would prove to be the same. 

Investigators were trying to determine whether the two
letters were related to other possible anthrax exposures
across the country. 

Both letters were handwritten in block letters on the
envelopes, copies of which were released on Tuesday by the
F.B.I. They were unsigned and contained no salutation, the
senior official said, and both contained a generalized
threat and did not appear to target the addressees. 

The official said that the letters contained phrases like
"Death to America," "You're going to die" and "Allah is
great." Investigators did not conclude that the reference
to Allah meant that the letter writer was an Islamic
extremist, or linked to Osama bin Laden, the official said.
But officials refused to rule out any possible motive for
the letters. 

Lieut. Dan Nichols of the Capitol police called the
shutdown of part of the Hart Senate Office Building "a
precautionary measure only" and said that security workers
planned "extensive testing" of the ventilation system. The
air conditioning and ventilation in that section of the
building was shut off about a half hour after Mr. Daschle's
aide found the package on Monday morning, according to
lawmakers. 

The White House communications director, Dan Bartlett, said
Tuesday night that the president would have no comment
until investigators "have a conclusive finding" about the
samples taken from the Senate. 

"We take all these cases involving anthrax very seriously,"
Mr. Bartlett said. "We will wait for a conclusive test." 

He said Mr. Bush did not attend the meeting with Mr. Ridge
on Tuesday afternoon, and was still planning his trip to
China. "Right now, his itinerary hasn't changed," he said.
"The president is confident in the federal agencies that
have been responding to this. What do you want him to do?
Hunker down? We're waiting for the tests and investigations
to take place." 

Dr. John Eisold, the attending physician at the Capitol,
said that several hundred people would be screened and
given antibiotics while they awaited the results of
testing. He said that officials wanted to "draw up the net
as widely as possible and err on the conservative side and
test and treat." Officials noted repeatedly that only the
letter had so far tested positive for anthrax and that it
was too early to have results from nasal swab testing. 

At a news conference, the F.B.I. director, Robert S.
Mueller III, said that threats of attacks against the
United States had not diminished since last week, when his
office issued a warning that there was a possibility of
another attack on America in the coming days. 

Mr. Mueller said the alert would continue in effect in part
because of the anthrax exposure cases. "Quite obviously,"
he said, "the incidents of anthrax exposures in the last
couple of days warrant such a continued state of alert." 

Still, Mr. Mueller did not say he believed the anthrax
outbreak was the attack warned of in intelligence
information received last week. 

A wave of anthrax hoaxes has burdened the F.B.I., which has
struggled to keep pace with the growing threat. Attorney
General John Ashcroft said on Tuesday that people who
perpetrate such hoaxes face federal prosecution. He
announced the indictment of a man in Connecticut who was
responsible for one such threat and now faces the
possibility of five years in prison and fines of up to $3
million.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/17/national/18CND-ANTH.html?ex=1004330168&ei=1&en=545bd58976814e6f



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