Amerithrax (37 page)

Three investigators visited the Nu-Look Beauty Parlor, where Mrs. Lundgren had her sparse white hair processed, and took dry and wet swabs from the parlor, then a clinic she frequented. The trio returned to their car to find they had locked themselves out. State police were summoned to open it for them. Next they made an intensive “grid-search” of her home for the letter. Eventually they took 449 samples from her home and thirty-three other places she sometimes visited. As tests continued on clothing and other belongings from Mrs. Lundgren’s home, Connecticut’s state epidemi- ologist, Dr. James L. Hadler, reported that none of Mrs. Lundgren’s first-class mail had passed through contaminated postal centers. On November 25, Wallingford was retested a third time and no spores were found.

Then it was learned that some of the bulk mail that went to Lundgren’s Oxford home had traveled through the postal center in Trenton. Could mail bound for Connecticut have been contaminated in Trenton, and then tainted machines in Connecticut? Could postal inspectors track such a large vol- ume of bulk mail, find that needle in the haystack?

Investigators had a new tool. The automated postal ma-

chinery (which sorted 95 percent of flat mail automatically) could track first-class mail. Bar codes, printed on the back and front of every piece of mail as it was canceled, regis- tered the time and place it had entered the system. Each letter gained a digital identity at each sorting hub, one that could be precisely tracked backward or forward. In looking for the attacker, the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service, using digital printouts, hoped to discern which postal route the letter had come from. They looked for any patterns in letters that had spun through the Hamilton Township center about the same time, but no patterns emerged. Bulk mail was so completely automated that none of its mailhandlers became infected. The best opportunity to use the data came only after Mrs. Lundgren fell ill, before Thanksgiving.

Until now, no one had used the data stored on magnetic tapes in the thousands of sorting machines in the nation’s 362 regional sorting centers to do anything other than locate lost letters. Conceivably, the data could allow them to iden- tify the tens of thousands of letters that passed through the Hamilton center within an hour or so of each of the known anthrax mailings.

Some officials pressed for release of that information, saying it could help people avoid exposure to anthrax. But others said such publicity would unnecessarily alarm com- munities that received mail that only theoretically held an- thrax traces. But postal officials and experts at the CDC later found this unnecessary. Testing of 284 post offices and mail sorting centers (those thought to be at greatest risk among the nation’s tens of thousands of postal centers) so far re- vealed only twenty-three tainted with anthrax. Most had just traces of contamination.

All those sites had been decontaminated with bleach ex- cept for the two big sorting centers where the assault began, in Hamilton Township and Washington, hubs that were shut down and quarantined a month earlier. In the CDC’s “Mor- bidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” analysts estimated that eighty-five million letters passed through the Hamilton Township and Washington hubs when both had “widespread environmental contamination” from spores sloughed off by the anthrax letters. Yet no new cases of skin or lung infec-

tions had emerged among the ten and a half million people served by those two hubs. Cross-contamination of as many as five thousand letters in the eastern U.S. may have caused the deaths of Nguyen in the Bronx and Lundgren in rural Connecticut.

“Despite this very low risk,” the report said, “persons remaining concerned about their risk may want to take ad- ditional steps such as not opening suspicious mail, keeping mail away from your face when you open it and not blowing or sniffing mail, as well as washing hands after handling letters and making sure to discard envelopes.”

“It’s been frustrating and unsettling,” said Connecticut Governor John Rowland. “You can’t figure out the source, so there’s no finality.”

On November 27, investigators in New Jersey reexam- ined the Hamilton postal sorting machines that had handled the letter Amerithrax mailed to Senator Daschle. Aided by the computer bar codes, they looked at all letters that had whisked through the sorting machines at the same time. Only one letter went to the part of Connecticut where Mrs. Lundgren lived and died, a letter to the John Farkas home in Seymour, three miles from Mrs. Lundgren’s Oxford home. That letter was processed in a New Jersey mail center within fifteen seconds of a contaminated letter. And as that letter made its way to Seymour, it passed through the Wal- lingford plant on October 11. When a team first went to the Farkas home, no such letter surfaced. But it was found shortly thereafter, and wiped with a swab. One spore took hold in a petri dish and blossomed into an anthrax colony. The Seymour letter retained enough anthrax to mark its route and offer a possible explanation of how anthrax could have reached and killed Ottilie W. Lundgren.

Investigators returned to Oxford’s local post office. On November 28, they conducted extensive retesting at Wal- lingford, this time with high-powered vacuums instead of dry and wet swabs. The new tests revealed anthrax spores on four of sixteen sorting machines. Evidently, a letter con- taminated in a sorting machine in New Jersey had tainted a postal bin in Wallingford that cross-contaminated a letter sent to Mrs. Lundgren in Oxford. More than 1,000 local

postal workers were put on a 60-day course of Cipro. One sorting machine that handled mostly bulk mail still had three million spores clinging to beneath it a month after tainted mail had passed through. One of fifty-two columns of mail bins tested positive for spores. The contaminated bin was the same used for Mrs. Lundgren’s mail route. The four hot sorters were tented and misted with clouds of bleach. Af- terward, all four tested negative as did the floor area sur- rounding them.

Paul Mead, a CDC epidemiologist at the Wallingford center, said the investigative team wanted to complete “a trace forward and a trace backward” of any contaminated mail found there. But tracing postmarked and bar-coded let- ters was easier than tracing prepaid bulk and commercial mail, which carried no postmark or other “unique identifi- ers.” “We have to look at other ways to track that mail forward,” Mead said. “We’re working with the Postal Ser- vice to come up with innovative ways to do that.”

Federal and state epidemiologists continued their crash course in postal routing and sorting. The discovery of spores bolstered the possible theory that Lundgren had contracted the disease through a tainted piece of bulk mail contami- nated by the letter to Seymour coming into contact with the Daschle letter.

The discovery of the single spore on a letter a few miles from Mrs. Lundgren’s home did not completely answer the question of how she could possibly have inhaled a lethal dose of anthrax spores. No contamination was found in her home or at any of the places she visited regularly. State and federal investigators in Connecticut continued scouring post offices and the Wallingford sorting center for other clues.

Some 80 percent of Lundgren’s mail was junk mail, and she made a practice of tearing it in half before throwing it away. This might have caused spores inside the paper fibers to be flung into her face. Ironically, on October 31, 2001, the USPS had told its employees: “Direct mail does not fit the suspicious mail profile.” In 2000 the USPS had earned

$64 billion in revenue, half from third-class junk mail direct marketers. Scientists estimated that the mail contamination had been slight, with too few spores to infect most people.

Studies in animals had suggested that a person would have to inhale thousands of spores to become ill. But Mrs. Lund- gren may have been especially vulnerable to the disease be- cause of her age. It may have taken very few spores to infect her. However, her death also meant that estimates of what makes a lethal dose of spores were not applicable to every- one. What she and Nguyen had in common was that both had been older. As in Russia, during the 1979 accidental anthrax aerosol release, older citizens were struck down at a higher rate than others. The parade of illnesses of postal workers who had been nowhere near sorting machines and the deaths of two women who had never touched an anthrax letter were the most puzzling questions of all. Secondary contamination was a barely possible explanation for the death of Ms. Nguyen.

Martin Blaser, chairman of medicine at the New York University Medical School, and Glenn Webb, a Vanderbilt University mathematician, coauthored a mathematical model to predict the course of future letterborne anthrax. Focusing only on anthrax-laden envelopes was a mistake, they said. From published accounts, Blaser and Webb developed a model that included mailboxes, entry post offices, regional sorting centers, destination post offices, and final destina- tions. Webb estimated that the letters probably contained one trillion spores. As they made their way through the mail stream they contaminated other letters. Their model graph- ically demonstrated how the anthrax spread throughout the mail system.

“We hope there won’t be any further outbreaks,” Blaser told the press, “but if there were, this could help us identify the populations at risk and might help us move more quickly to find the source of the initial exposures. What was partic- ularly disturbing was the woman in the Bronx, because there was no clear way in which she got the anthrax. But as soon as the Connecticut case came up, I had a pretty good hy- pothesis about what was going on—cross-contamination carrying a low dose of the microbe.” Webb added, “The original letters were extremely dangerous, but there was also great danger from cross-contamination.”

On December 9, eleven days after Wallingford tested

positive for anthrax, employees and union management at the facility would be told that only “trace amounts of an- thrax” were discovered on three machines and “a fourth ma- chine was more heavily contaminated.” Not until March 2003 would Connecticut postal workers learn the truth. A sorter was tainted with over three million spores. In the meantime, based on the misinformation, some workers had stopped taking Cipro early. “We were just outright lied to,” John Dirzius, regional president of the American Postal Workers Union, told Dan Davidson of
Federal Times.com.
“We were hailing them as heroes and presented them with awards, all the while they were making jackasses out of us. If Dr. Hadler had never made a comment in the press, we never would have found out about this. They would have thought they could get away with it. We are pursuing legal action. We intend to file a reckless endangerment suit against the Postal Service. And we never received an apol- ogy. All we ever got was the cold shoulder. They are not even talking to us.” The USPS thought decontaminating the facility and sealing the contaminated machinery was suffi- cient to deal with the concentration of spores. Retesting would concentrate on ceiling surfaces and air ducts where spores could collect in the dust and be stirred into the air.

Senator Lieberman asked the GAO to investigate the USPS’s response to the Wallingford facility’s contamina- tion. “Based on the information given to me,” he wrote, “I am concerned that there may have been a failure by public health officials to disclose to postal workers and others all the information that was available regarding the actual level of contamination of the Connecticut facility.” The senator wanted to know who knew what when. In the case of Brent- wood, the national union learned about the result of that plant’s anthrax decontamination only after it was reported in the press. Their experts had not been allowed to review the raw data. An employee group, “Brentwood Exposed,” complained of “scant and infrequent” information from the USPS and sought to make changes.

There might have been many other misdiagnosed cases of anthrax in the nation than suspected. The CDC’s Dr. Jef- frey Koplan reported, “It’s conceivable that our heightened

surveillance has picked things up that wouldn’t have been there before. [But] we have to pursue this vigorously as potentially related to these other criminal acts.” Because the CDC’s surveillance had turned up no new anthrax cases since Mrs. Lundgren’s, they believed that any further risk from the mails was minimal—barring a new round of letters from Amerithrax.

The steady increase in postal automation was a double- edged sword. On one hand, it allowed postal inspectors to backtrack letters. On the other, the higher sorting speeds had led to a more vigorous passage of spores from letter to ma- chine to letter. The whirling sorting machines, shaking, pounding, and compressing, were akin to adding anthrax to a blender.

Once the nature of the anthrax preparation became evi- dent, “it was very chilling,” said Patrick Donahoe, the Postal Service’s chief operating officer. The Postal Service added filtered vacuum hoses to its equipment to cleanse the air. It ceased using pressurized air hoses to clear dust from sorting machines. Investigators repeatedly said there was something particularly deadly about the spores sent to Senator Daschle, but the strain of anthrax in all the incidents was the same.

The FBI pinned its hopes on determining which of the hundred plus genetically distinct strains of anthrax were sent through the mails. Many types of anthrax were held at mi- crobiology labs across the country. Three FBI agents with Ph.Ds in the sciences were collaborating with experts to nar- row the universe of possibilities of the five million genes in a strand of anthrax.