October 14, 2001, Washington Post i The Seattle Times, Anthrax confirmed at Microsoft in Reno; 5 more cases in Florida, by Michael Powell and Justin Blum,
October 14, 2001, Washington Post - Quad‑City Times, 5 new cases of anthrax reported,
Federal officials confirmed Saturday that they've found anthrax in a third state, as law enforcement and health officials scrambled to investigate a growing number of illnesses and letters carrying the deadly bacterium.
Nevada officials said that a letter postmarked from Malaysia had tested positive for anthrax spores and New York physicians are investigating a possible new case of anthrax infection at NBC.
In Florida, officials reported five new cases of anthrax exposure at the American Media Inc. office building, bringing the number of infected employees to eight. One man has died. Authorities said that none of the new people found infected has displayed any symptoms, and all are being treated with antibiotics.
In New York City, health officials report that a second employee has shown symptoms of skin anthrax exposure. A personal assistant to NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw already is known to be infected with a form of anthrax, apparently after she handled a letter postmarked in Trenton on Sept. 18.
And in Edison, N.J., a man who works at the Ford Motor Co. plant in Edison, N.J., has had an ambiguous test result for anthrax, and is undergoing additional tests. The man, 58, had a rash on his body similar to the type for cutaneous anthrax, and he went to a hospital, where a nurse notified the FBI, according to the FBI's Newark Field Office.
The letters and additional test results raise new questions about a possible concerted attempt to spread the rare and often deadly disease. The letter to Nevada was postmarked in Malaysia and the letter to NBC was postmarked in Trenton, N.J.Both are believed to have relatively heavy concentrations of operatives and supporters of Osama bin Laden, intelligence experts say.
Jersey City was the cradle of the plot to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. And bin Laden associates met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's largest city, in January 2000 to help plan the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen later that year.
FBI officials are pursuing a possible link between the anthrax cases and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. But they emphasized that it is too soon to gauge the importance of the postmarks.
"These cases are all at different stages," one FBI official said. "It's really too early for us to make any judgments yet."
Bard O'Neill, a Middle East terrorism expert at the National Defense University, cautioned against quick conclusions but added that the letters suggest a pattern.
"What's more likely in my mind is this is somehow being encouraged or instigated by bin Laden's people," O'Neill said. "If this was just a bunch of nuts doing this from around the world, the letters probably wouldn't fall in the same time frame."
In Nevada, Gov. Kerry Guinn (R) confirmed that a suspicious letter sent to a Microsoft subsidiary in Reno has tested positive for anthrax. The state epidemiologist said investigators had performed three tests on the letter and its contents, and they had found the anthrax bacilli.
At least six employees of Microsoft Licensing Inc. apparently handled the letter or its contents, but examinations of their skin, noses and throats have found no trace of anthrax.
The letter included several pages of pornographic pictures, apparently ripped out of a magazine. It had sat unopened in the Microsoft subsidiary for several weeks.
"We want everyone to know that all our laboratory microbiologists feel this is a very, very low risk for public health," Guinn said at an afternoon news conference in Carson City, Nev. He said that the letter did not contain powders likely to become airborne. The disease is far more lethal when the spores can enter the lungs.
In New York, the investigation took a new turn as city health officials found a second female NBC employee with signs of anthrax infection. She had a low-grade fever, headaches and lesions, which a spokesman defined as sores that do not appear to be healing.
This woman was the NBC employee who first opened the letter from Trenton on Sept. 19 or 20, and found a brown granular substance inside.
"At the time she opened this, some brown stuff spilled out," said Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News. "She thought nothing of it at the time. It was long before Florida, the anthrax scare. It was placed with some of the hate mail."
The letter was passed onto Brokaw's assistant, Erin O'Connor. A few days later a different letter arrived from St. Petersburg, Fla., containing a white substance. Then NBC news staffers began trying to track down any other letters with white substances.
At that point, the second woman recalled opening a letter with a brown substance.
"This person helped us close the loop, solve the mystery," said Shapiro.
O'Connor, meanwhile, had fallen ill, as what she had thought was a mosquito bite near her collarbone spread into an inch and a half black rash. "It was more than a rash," said her father, John O'Connor. "It looked like something had gouged it out."
City and federal health officials described her symptoms as mild. But her father said his daughter became quite ill the weekend of Sept. 29. "She had a very high fever," he said. "She got a little delirious from it."
On Monday, Oct. 1, she visited a specialist, Richard Fried. He suspected anthrax and placed her on Cipro, which has stanched the infection. Fried said he notified the city health department but some authorities said the case revealed holes in the public health system. Fried said he was surprised to find the city knew nothing of the NBC incident when he called.
The network had turned the letter over to the FBI almost a week earlier.
"I was surprised to learn on October 1 that they had no prior knowledge of this," Fried said.
The reports of new anthrax cases in Florida come one day after the FBI announced that only one of the nearly 1,000 nasal swabs of company employees, contractors, messengers and relatives had tested positive for the disease. Now, more sensitive blood tests, which measure a body's response to an infection, have found five new cases. Employees of AMI were advised Saturday to continue taking antibiotics, said AMI general counsel Michael Kahane.
"Five people have tested positive for anthrax, which would indicate that at some point in their lives, they have had exposure," said Kahane, who said he arranged with Florida officials to provide antibiotics for as long as necessary. He said he was afraid that employees had interpreted Friday's FBI news as a reason to stop taking the medicine.
Two of the five whose blood tested positive work for the National Enquirer, according to an Enquirer employee who was briefed by an editor and spoke on condition of anonymity. One employee has a fever, but it is unclear whether the fever is connected to anthrax.
AMI owns both the Enquirer and the Sun.
Three of the employees found to be infected do not handle mail and sit in a separate section of the third floor, far from Bob Stevens, the Sun photo editor who died Oct. 5 from Anthrax. They work down a hall and around the corner from the Sun.
News of the new infections rattled employees.
"It's like what does this mean? The infestation is more widespread than we thought and it came a different way," the Enquirer staffer said."It's scary."
In Boca Raton, the postal workers union reported that one of its members, Rose Anderson, 55, had slipped into a coma and was on a respirator. Anderson sorted mail for the neighborhood that includes AMI, according to Judy Johnson, general president of the American Postal Workers Union in South Florida. An FBI spokesperson disputed whether Anderson would have come in contact with mail for AMI.
She said that health officials took a nasal swab from Anderson and it tested negative. But Johnson is worried that the anthrax virus may have been in an incubation period at that time.
"The pattern is identical to the gentleman who died," Johnson said, referring to Stevens.
Johnson said that 15 to 20 postal workers had been tested for anthrax and called on officials to test more employees.
The FBI, meanwhile, continues to pursue its criminal investigation, and agents have questioned several AMI employees. The FBI asked basic questions at first, employees said, and began follow-up interviews late this past week. Investigators are asking employees if anyone in their families has worked as a biologist, or is familiar with chemicals.
Investigators also have been asking about disgruntled former employees.
"They were interested in pretty much anything we had to tell them, the mail we received, if we received anything unusual," said Edith Schorah, a senior editorial assistant at the National Enquirer, one of the AMI tabloids.
Schorah said FBI agents on Thursday went to her house and asked if Stevens had any enemies who worked in the building.
"I said that was not possible," said Schorah, a long-time friend of Stevens, who said he was widely liked.
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October 14, 2001, Washington Post - The Seattle Times, Anthrax confirmed at Microsoft in Reno; 5 more cases in Florida, by Michael Powell and Justin Blum,
Federal officials confirmed yesterday that a letter sent to a Microsoft subsidiary in Reno, Nev., contained anthrax spores, as law-enforcement and health officials scrambled to investigate a growing number of illnesses and suspicious letters.
In New York, physicians are investigating a possible new case of anthrax infection at NBC, and in Florida, officials reported five new cases of anthrax exposure at the American Media office building, bringing the number of infected employees to eight. One man has died. Authorities said that none of the new people found infected has displayed any symptoms, and all are being treated with antibiotics.
In New York City, health officials report that a second employee has shown symptoms of skin anthrax exposure. A personal assistant to NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw already is known to be infected with a form of anthrax, apparently after she handled a letter postmarked in Trenton on Sept. 18.
And in Edison, N.J., a man who works at the Ford Motor plant in Edison, N.J., has had an ambiguous test result for anthrax, and is undergoing additional tests. The man, 58, had a rash on his body similar to the type for cutaneous anthrax, and he went to a hospital, where a nurse notified the FBI, according to the FBI's Newark Field Office.
Postmarks significant?
The letters and additional test results raise new questions about a possible concerted attempt to spread the rare and often deadly disease. The letter to Microsoft was postmarked in Malaysia and the letter to NBC was postmarked in Trenton, N.J. Both are believed to have relatively heavy concentrations of operatives and supporters of Osama bin Laden, intelligence experts say.
Jersey City was the cradle of the plot to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. And bin Laden associates met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's largest city, in January 2000 to help plan the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen later that year.
FBI officials are pursuing a possible link between the anthrax cases and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. But they emphasized that it is too soon to gauge the importance of the postmarks.
"These cases are all at different stages," one FBI official said. "It's really too early for us to make any judgments yet."
Five Microsoft employees in Reno and a family member of one employee were being tested for anthrax but as of yesterday afternoon, examinations of their skin, noses and throats have found no trace of anthrax.
The letter included several pages of pornographic pictures, apparently ripped out of a magazine.
Further testing on letter
The letter was sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta for further tests. By today, those tests are expected to reveal the strain of anthrax.
Nevada officials praised Microsoft employees for quickly realizing the letter was something of concern and minimizing its handling. The company would not name the employees involved, but such a letter would likely have come in contact with accountants at the office and supervisors called to investigate something out of the ordinary.
About 75 people work at the Reno office, a subsidiary that handles software licenses issued to computer manufacturers. The office had sent the letter, containing a check, to a manufacturer in Malaysia. The envelope came back containing the check and pornography pages, including one tainted with anthrax.
Word that the letter may indeed be anthrax traveled quickly yesterday among employees, who had been told Friday that a preliminary test did not indicate the letter was a risk.
There were no reports yesterday of any suspicious letters to Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, where executives used e-mail and voice mail to reassure employees. The company employs about 23,500 locally and 47,600 altogether.
"We recognize that this situation is potentially unsettling but I would urge everyone to wait for the final test results before drawing any conclusions," Rick Devenuti, vice president and chief information officer, said in an e-mail explaining the situation. He said health officials had assured the company that "there is virtually no risk to anyone other than the small number of employees who came into direct contact with the material, since person-to-person spread of anthrax is extremely unlikely."
Even before the Reno incident, Redmond police met with Microsoft to discuss precautions in case of a terrorist incident. Like police around the country, they are discussing precautions with major employers and increasing their visibility on the streets to reassure residents, said Lt. Shari Shovlin.
In New York, the investigation took a new turn as city health officials found a second female NBC employee with signs of anthrax infection. She had a low-grade fever, headaches and lesions, which a spokesman defined as sores that do not appear to be healing.
This woman was the NBC employee who first opened the letter from Trenton on Sept. 19 or 20, and found a brown granular substance inside.
"At the time she opened this, some brown stuff spilled out," said Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News. "She thought nothing of it at the time. It was long before Florida, the anthrax scare. It was placed with some of the hate mail."
The letter was passed onto Brokaw's assistant, Erin O'Connor. A few days later a letter arrived from St. Petersburg, Fla., containing a white substance. Then NBC news staffers began trying to track down any other letters with white substances.
At that point, the second woman recalled opening a letter with a brown substance.
O'Connor, meanwhile, had fallen ill, as what she had thought was a mosquito bite near her collarbone spread into an inch-and-a-half black rash. "It was more than a rash," said her father, John O'Connor. "It looked like something had gouged it out."
City and federal health officials described her symptoms as mild. But her father said his daughter became quite ill the weekend of Sept. 29. "She had a very high fever," he said. "She got a little delirious from it."
The reports of new anthrax cases in Florida come one day after the FBI announced that only one of the nearly 1,000 nasal swabs of company employees, contractors, messengers and relatives had tested positive for the disease. Now, more sensitive blood tests, which measure a body's response to an infection, have found five new cases. Employees of AMI were advised yesterday to continue taking antibiotics, said AMI general counsel Michael Kahane.
"Five people have tested positive for anthrax, which would indicate that at some point in their lives, they have had exposure," said Kahane, who said he arranged with Florida officials to provide antibiotics for as long as necessary. He said he was afraid that employees had interpreted Friday's FBI news as a reason to stop taking the medicine.
Two of the five whose blood tested positive work for the National Enquirer, according to an Enquirer employee who was briefed by an editor and spoke on condition of anonymity. One employee has a fever, but it is unclear whether the fever is connected to anthrax.
AMI owns both the Enquirer and the Sun.
Three of the employees found to be infected do not handle mail and sit in a separate section of the third floor, far from Bob Stevens, the Sun photo editor who died Oct. 5 from anthrax. They work near the Sun.
News of the new infections rattled employees.
"It's like what does this mean? The infestation is more widespread than we thought, and it came a different way," the Enquirer staffer said. "It's scary."
Seattle Times reporter Brier Dudley contributed to this report.
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October 13, 2001, Washington Post, Fourth Case of Anthrax Is Identified; NBC Employee in N.Y. Tests Positive Weeks After Opening Letter from Fla., by Michael Powell and Ceci Connolly, Archived, diigo,
October 13, 2001, Washington Post, Fourth Case of Anthrax Is Identified, by Michael Powell and Ceci Connolly,
October 14, 2001, Washington Post, An NBC Employee in N.Y. Tests Positive for Anthrax; FBI Suspects Bacteria Was in Letter From Fla., by Michael Powell and Ceci Connolly,
A female aide to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw has been infected with a form of anthrax, apparently after opening a letter containing a suspicious powder two weeks ago, the company and the FBI said Friday.
The letter was postmarked in Florida and addressed to Brokaw. The FBI has launched a criminal probe of the incident, which marks the fourth known case of exposure to the extremely rare and deadly bacterium in less than a week, but the first one north of Florida.
The NBC employee, identified by co-workers as Erin O'Connor, 38, contracted anthrax through a cut in her hand, a mode of infection far less lethal than inhaling anthrax spores. O'Connor is being treated with antibiotics and her prognosis is good.
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October 13, 2001, Washington Post, Fourth Case Of Anthrax Is Identified, by Michael Powell and Ceci Connolly, Archived,
NEW YORK, Oct. 12 -- A female aide to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw has been infected with a form of anthrax, apparently after opening a letter containing a suspicious powder two weeks ago, the company and the FBI said today.
The letter was postmarked in Florida and addressed to Brokaw. The FBI has launched a criminal probe of the incident, which marks the fourth known case of exposure to the extremely rare and deadly bacterium in less than a week, but the first one north of Florida.
The NBC employee, identified by co-workers as Erin O'Connor, 38, contracted anthrax through a cut in her hand, a mode of infection far less lethal than inhaling anthrax spores. O'Connor is being treated with antibiotics and her prognosis is good.
While officials said they had no evidence that the anthrax case in New York was connected to the Florida cases, Vice President Cheney said that federal investigators should assume the cases might be related, and that they were investigating any possible connection to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
"The only responsible thing for us to do is proceed on the basis that it could be linked," Cheney told PBS's "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."
"And obviously that means you've got to spend time as well, as we've known now for some time, focusing on other types of attacks besides the one that we experienced on September 11," the vice president said.
"We know," he added, that Osama bin Laden "has over the years tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical weapons . . . they've . . . train[ed] people with respect to how to deploy and use these kinds of substances."
As night fell today, reports came in from across the nation of bomb and anthrax scares, along with unconfirmed reports of additional letters containing powder in other cities. The FBI had issued a strong but non-specific warning of a possible terrorist attack sometime in the United States during the next few days.
The U.S. Postal Service today warned that Americans should not open suspicious packages, such as those without return addresses. In New York City, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani also urged New Yorkers who find suspicious packages to leave them undisturbed and call the police. If packages contain anthrax spores, the slightest disturbance could shake them loose.
The letter to the NBC employee was postmarked in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Sept. 20. It contained general threats but no specific targets, an FBI official said. " 'You are all going to die,' was the general idea of it," an FBI official said.
Another letter postmarked from the same city on Oct. 5 arrived at the New York Times today, addressed to Judith Miller, a reporter who is a specialist in bioterrorism. As Miller opened the envelope, a fine white powder spilled out, dousing her lap and falling to the floor. The letter contained a handwritten note that threatened a terror attack on the Sears Tower in Chicago. City officials said the powder did not appear to be infected with anthrax and last night said test results had come back negative.
Giuliani and other federal officials appealed for calm, stressing that the anthrax case at NBC appeared to be isolated. "I know that people are very overwrought, but so far we are dealing with one case," he said. "People should not be terribly, terribly worried."
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson issued a similar appeal at a news conference in Washington. He stressed that anthrax was not contagious. "Our public health system is on a heightened sense of alert," he said. "We are responding very aggressively."
But as news of the case rippled through a city caught in the emotional aftershock of the World Trade Center attacks, hundreds of New Yorkers appeared at emergency rooms. Hundreds more made panicky calls to doctors, demanding antibiotics to treat anthrax.
New York City's Health Department weighed in for the first time, asking front-line doctors not to write prescriptions.
"We urge physicians to resist the pressure that patients are putting on them," said Stephen Ostroff, an associate director at the National Center for Infectious Diseases.
At Rockefeller Center, where the NBC offices are located, police sealed off the third floor and parts of two others while federal health investigators examined the building. The Associated Press, located across the street from NBC, temporarily closed its mailroom, as did CBS. ABC halted internal mail delivery in New York and Washington pending a security evaluation, while other major news organizations enacted similar restrictions.
And at the New York Times, where police sealed the building for several hours, employees stuck outside broke into tears and phoned family. Rhonda Cole, a senior sales executive at the newspaper, returned from a meeting to find the building locked down. For the first time, the cumulative events of the past weeks took a toll.
"I'm shaky. I'm weak," said Cole, as she stood behind a police barrier on Broadway and watched hazardous-materials crews walk into her office building. "Now I'm afraid. It's where I work. After a while, it's too much."
The type of infection that NBC's O'Connor developed is known as cutaneous anthrax, which occurs when anthrax spores enter the skin through a cut. It is exceedingly rare in the United States. The first symptoms of skin anthrax are reddish-black sores on the exposed skin. Without treatment, cutaneous anthrax is fatal in one out of four cases. The skin and inhaled forms of anthrax are caused by the same bacterium.
Doctors are still not certain how O'Connor contracted the disease, though they say the letter is the most likely explanation. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention twice tested the envelope and reported finding no anthrax. But doctors speculated yesterday they may not have obtained enough of the powder to find spores.
O'Connor opened the suspicious envelope on Sept. 25. Three days later, she noticed a sore or scab, and on Oct. 1, she asked her doctor to check a small dark lesion. The physician prescribed Cipro, the most common antibiotic for treating anthrax. "A very alert and astute clinician" ordered skin tests, CDC Deputy Director David Fleming said.
This Wednesday, skin samples and a small sample of the powder arrived at the CDC labs. The next day, a CDC team arrived in New York to investigate further, and at 3:25 a.m. today, CDC labs confirmed the case and notified O'Connor, New York officials and the National Security Council.
NBC, however, notified the FBI much earlier about the suspicious letter, and the bureau responded the following day. However, officials said O'Connor was "unavailable" for three days and FBI agents did not interview her until after she had already talked to her doctor about a possible exposure.
The letter was submitted for anthrax testing, which initially came back negative, said Barry Mawn, head of the FBI's New York office. He added that his agency did not see the need to notify city officials until test results revealed anthrax.
"She has been -- as she always is -- a rock. She's been an inspiration to us all," Brokaw said of O'Connor during the "Nightly News," which was broadcast from the ground-floor "Today" show studios instead of from its usual third-floor home. "But this is so unfair and so outrageous and so maddening, it's beyond my ability to express it in socially acceptable terms. So we'll just reserve our thoughts and our prayers for our friend and her family."
In Boca Raton, Fla., FBI field office chief Hector M. Pesquera was reluctant during a news conference to suggest a link between the three Florida cases and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
Investigators clad in white hazardous-materials suits have spent days combing through the American Media Inc. (AMI) office building in Boca Raton, and they found spores in a mail slot designated for two of the three employees infected with anthrax. The building was sealed off after Robert Stevens, photo editor of the Sun, a supermarket tabloid, contracted anthrax and died of the disease. Doctors later found anthrax spores in the nasal cavities of two more employees, but neither of those workers developed the disease.
Health officials have since tested more than 1,000 people for anthrax in that region of Florida, and 965 of the results have come back, identifying no new cases. The FBI and health officials have expanded their tests to the small number of postal service sorters who handle mail for AMI. Some of these employees were tested this morning.
At least 800 more interviews lie ahead for the FBI, in what Pesquera described as the "most intensive investigation that this state has ever known." FBI agents are interviewing postal carriers and local courier companies.
The FBI's hazardous-materials team has subjected the anthrax spores collected in Florida to "genetic fingerprinting," said Douglas Breecher, a member of the FBI team. Doctors hope that such tests will help them discern where the strains might have originated. Breecher said the FBI has found no evidence the anthrax had been genetically modified. That prospect was particularly worrisome, as modified anthrax could prove resistant to antibiotics.
Staff writers Robert O'Harrow, Susan Schmidt, Justin Blum, Peter Slevin, David Brown, Rick Weiss and Dan Eggen, and researcher Richard Drezen, contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/01/AR2008080101200.html
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