Anthrax turned up in a Pentagon post office and authorities delayed using a potent gas to decontaminate a Senate office building on Monday, while scientists unveiled a DNA test that could speed the detection of the dangerous germ warfare bacterium.
Hospital worker and Vietnamese immigrant Kathy Nguyen, the fourth person to die of anthrax since Oct. 5, was mourned in a funeral service in New York City as authorities remained baffled about how she contracted the disease.
But Norma Wallace, a New Jersey postal worker who beat the most deadly form of anthrax, offered words of encouragement as she checked out of a hospital. A State Department employee still hospitalized in Virginia with inhalation anthrax made sufficient improvement to be taken out of intensive care.
PHOTO: REUTERS
A spate of letters laced with powdery anthrax spores has been sent by unknown perpetrators through the US mail since the Sept. 11 attacks on the US. There have been 17 confirmed anthrax cases in what President George W. Bush has called a second wave of terrorism after the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 4,800 people.
Authorities said traces of anthrax were found in two mail rental boxes at a public post office located inside the Pentagon, which was damaged on Sept. 11 by a hijacked airliner. The post office was decontaminated and no further signs of the spores were found.
The post office was examined because its mail comes from the central processing facility in Washington that handled an anthrax-tainted letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle last month. Two employees at that facility died of anthrax.
The Pentagon post office is used by many of the 23,000 military and civilian workers at the mammoth US Defense Department headquarters across the Potomac River from Washington in Arlington, Virginia.
Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood said the two positive samples at the post office were among 17 taken at the facility on Oct. 30 and were found in two rental mailboxes, one unassigned and one rented by a sailor who is being tested for possible anthrax exposure. The facility was decontaminated over the weekend and remained closed despite being give a clean bill of health, authorities said.
Anthrax has been found in numerous other federal buildings and post offices across the Washington area.
The tainted letter sent to Daschle was opened on Oct. 15 in his office in the Hart Senate Office Building, which is set to remain shut until completion of a cleanup by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which had been expected to end on Nov. 13.
But EPA spokesman Patrick Boyle said plans to decontaminate the entire Hart building with chlorine dioxide gas have been shelved due to concerns expressed by some experts that the method would not work on such a large scale.
"They concur with the technology of gassing but are skeptical it would be effective in a large building like that and that there could be other problems associated with it. They suggested we proceed more incrementally and not gas the building in one fell swoop," said Boyle.
Boyle said the EPA had begun using "more standard technology" such as wiping with bleach. "That's not to say we are going to rule out the use of the gas but basically the decision has not been made to do that full scale," he added.
Meanwhile, a House of Representatives office building reopened after being closed on Oct. 26 after traces of anthrax were found in the offices of three congressmen. Those three offices remained closed.
A leading medical research institute, the Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, announced that it had developed a test for anthrax that works in one hour and can be used both on people and in the environment. Current tests can take days.
The DNA-based test uses technology developed by Swiss drug maker Roche Holding AG to look quickly for DNA from the anthrax bacteria that cause anthrax.
"Until now, local labs have been able to quickly determine the presence of a bacterium, but they can't tell whether it is anthrax or not," said Mayo Clinic microbiologist Dr. Franklin Cockerill. "The current process to identify the presence of anthrax may take several days. The events of the last several weeks require as rapid a response as possible."
Roche is seeking expedited regulatory approval for the test from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Cockerill said.
After spending 18 days in a Mount Holly, New Jersey hospital for treatment of inhalational anthrax, 56-year-old postal worker Wallace returned home with a message for Americans not to give in to fears about anthrax attacks.
"There is hope," she told a news conference.
"I don't think that we should stand back and cower," Wallace said. "We have the greatest scientists, we have the greatest physicians. We don't have to stand back in fear. We just have to step forward and apply the knowledge we know to overcome whatever challenges stand before us."
Wallace nearly died after anthrax toxins caused her lungs to flood with fluid.
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