On Tuesday, Oct. 9, someone put a prepaid envelope, sealed with tape and containing anthrax, in a mailbox or slot in central New Jersey and it started a six-day journey to the office of Tom Daschle, the US Senate majority leader.
On Monday, Oct. 15, an aide to Daschle opened it in the Hart Senate Office Building, releasing a puff of spores.
A week later, two people were dead, four others were being treated for serious lung infections and traces of anthrax spores were showing up in federal offices, mail rooms and postal buildings around the capital and back along the letter's path.
PHOTO: AP
But the outbreak was nowhere near the target. The people who died and became seriously ill were postal workers working in back rooms in windowless buildings, not aides or officials on Capitol Hill.
The letter to Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota, was not the only anthrax-laden mail to travel through the postal system in recent weeks. And no one can say for sure that the single letter to Daschle caused all this havoc.
But health officials and other investigators say they have yet to find a hint of some other cause for anthrax lung infections that closely followed its passage.
"In epidemiology we talk about person, place and time," said Dr. Eddy A. Bresnitz, the New Jersey state epidemiologist. "Those are the key characteristics in evaluating an outbreak of disease."
The letter began its journey like the more than 200 billion other pieces of mail that flow through the US postal system each year, arriving in one of the hundreds of white bins of mail delivered in trucks from the 46 post offices that feed mail to the Hamilton Township sorting center in New Jersey. Nearly 1,000 people work there, sifting packages and operating automated machines that cancel arriving letters and translate written addresses into bar codes.
This machinery moves 30,000 pieces an hour, zipping them at high speeds around turns far tighter than those on even the most stomach-turning roller coaster.
The energy and pressures applied to each envelope would be sufficient to loft a spray of minute particles, even from a sealed letter, postal officials and anthrax experts say now, a possibility they had not considered before.
In testimony at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, John E. Potter, the postmaster general, said that a particular machine that sorted mail by its bar codes would have stashed it with others destined for Washington government ZIP codes.
From there, it would have traveled in a bundle to a trucking depot in Carteret, New Jersey, where it would have been loaded on a truck and driven to the giant Brentwood sorting building in Washington that receives all the district's incoming mail.
It was not necessary for any of those who developed inhalation anthrax to be in direct contact with the letter, investigators said. Until last week, the sorting machinery was routinely cleaned with blasts of compressed air that could easily put more clouds of spores into the air.
According to reports on the lung infections among postal workers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the cases played out like clockwork. The letter went through Hamilton on Oct. 9 and two workers there developed symptoms on Oct. 14 and 15, a typical incubation period for inhalation anthrax.
The first, a 56-year-old woman who was a mail handler in Hamilton, went to a hospital on the 14th with fever, diarrhea and vomiting. She was treated and released, but returned on the 19th. By the next day, chest X-rays and blood tests confirmed inhalation anthrax. She is slowly recuperating, officials said.
The next New Jersey case, a man whose age has not been released by the authorities, reported getting sick on the 15th. Lung anthrax was diagnosed, and he was treated and is "doing well," officials said.
By then, the letter had already spun its way through the machinery at Brentwood, 170 miles to the south. It is not clear exactly when it arrived there, but by Oct. 12 it was headed to a building where congressional mail was X-rayed -- but not tested for biological contaminants.
By Oct. 16, mail handlers at Brentwood were starting to feel sick. Four developed lung infections. On Oct. 21 and Oct. 22, two of those workers died.
By the 18th, postal officials had initiated testing of machinery and other areas at the Brentwood center for anthrax spores.
Swabs taken on machinery and surfaces along the path followed by the Daschle letter consistently disclosed anthrax spores; they turned up along the route taken by mail bound for the Capitol, past optical readers, bar code printers and separate chutes, belts and trays, said Sue Brennan, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service.
The test results came to the Postal Service on Oct. 22. All in all, 14 out of 29 test swabs were positive, and most of the positive findings came along the letter's trail.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique