A 94-year-old woman who lived alone and seldom left her rural home died of the inhaled form of anthrax in a baffling new twist in the bioterrorism investigation.
Ottilie Lundgren died Wednesday, five days after she was hospitalized with respiratory problems. Lundgren, who lived outside this town 100km northeast of New York City, is the fifth person to die of anthrax in the US since early October, and the first case of the disease outside New York, New Jersey, Florida or Washington.
Her death and that of a New York City hospital worker are the only ones that have not been linked to tainted mail.
Authorities said there was no immediate evidence of a crime in Lundgren's death, but the FBI and the government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, began retracing her steps over the past month and are looking at the mail as a potential source.
"We're not focused on any one thing, although the mail is certainly an obvious issue," FBI spokeswoman Lisa Bull said. "But we're really trying to keep an open mind about any possibility."
The anthrax that killed Lund-gren is indistinguishable from the strains investigated in the earlier cases, CDC spokeswoman Nicole Coffin said.
She said it was too early to speculate on what the conclusion might mean and whether it suggested a link to the mail. No anthrax-tainted letters have been reported in southwestern Connecticut, and tests at a regional mail-sorting center last week came up clean.
The nation's last anthrax death was Oct. 31, when the hospital worker died in New York, 110km away from Lundgren's modest ranch home in rural Oxford. Lundgren had no known links to any of the previous victims.
With this second unexplained anthrax case, CDC Director Dr. Jeffrey Koplan acknowledged he could not discount the possibility that naturally occurring anthrax is more common than doctors thought and is only now being discovered.
But he called that unlikely, particularly in an Eastern state where animal anthrax has not been detected.
"Could one find anthrax spores in a garden in that area? I'm sure one could. Is it likely to be a source of inhalation anthrax? Very unlikely," he said. Thus, "we have to pursue this vigorously as potentially related to these other criminal acts."
Governor John Rowland called Lundgren's death the result of "domestic terrorism."
"There's no question this is a crime. No question this is a homicide," he said. "Anthrax is not an accident."
Evidence from Lundgren's home, including mail, will be tested for anthrax. Results are not expected until later this week.
So far, investigators have found no clues to possible anthrax exposure -- such as using imported wool -- in Lundgren's hobbies or daily routine.
Her niece, Shirley Davis, said the widowed retiree seldom left home except for church and a weekly visit to the beauty parlor.
Before this fall, the last US case of inhalation anthrax was reported in 1976.
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