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.
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