With America on edge over anthrax-by-mail, the post office signed a US$40 million contract Saturday to buy eight electron-beam devices to sanitize letters and packages. The equipment will be used first in Washington, where the anthrax scare has spread from mail centers for Congress and the White House to the Supreme Court and the CIA.
All Supreme Court justices are taking antibiotics as a precaution along with other employees in the building, Ivan Walks, Washington's public health director, said Saturday. No new cases of anthrax had been reported in people or buildings over the weekend, he added.
Questions remain over whether the anthrax letters were part of some foreign act of terror or domestic. Handwriting analysis and profiling are leading investigators to increasingly suspect that one person wrote the three letters contaminated with anthrax and that the person spent significant time in the US, officials say.
The officials cautioned that they have not identified specific suspects and continue to consider a variety of theories, including that a deranged US resident with a biochemical background, a terrorist or hate group, a foreign country or some combination carried out the attacks.
The postal service buried a mail handler killed by anthrax while the search for the bacteria widened to thousands of busi-nesses in Washington and 30 mail distribution centers. Authorities worried that there might be a second anthrax-laced letter, or more, not yet discovered.
In New Jersey, state health officials said that about 600 people who visited non-public areas of a Hamilton Township mail processing facility where anthrax was found should take antibiotics.
The recommendation applies mainly to workers from some 300 corporations who pick up or drop off mail. Five New Jersey postal workers have contracted the disease.
Also Saturday, officials closed the Princeton post office after a single anthrax spore was found in a colony of several types of bacteria on a mail bin, health department spokesman Tom Slater said.
About 68 tons of letters and other material from Washington were being trucked to a plant in Lima, Ohio, to be decontaminated with electron beams normally used to sterilize hospital equipment.
Dr. Gregory Martin of the National Naval Medical Center said that anthrax contamination discovered Friday at three congressional offices in the Longworth House Office Building was low level.
Workers in those offices and at the Supreme Court are being treated with doxycycline as a pre-caution, he said, and people who have visited the congressional offices where spores were found were also urged to seek the antibiotic. A Supreme Court offsite mail handling office was found to be contaminated and Martin says doxycycline was being given to workers there.
The Washington health department said it was prescribing doxycycline to new cases where people need preventive antibiotics and was switching old cases to that drug from Cipro, which had originally been recommended. Walks said that doxycycline has fewer side effects than Cipro.
Another suspicious letter turned up in Florida Saturday, when a letter on its way to US Representative Mark Foley's office in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, started seeping white powder in the local post office. The letter, which was handwritten and had no return address, was sent to an FBI lab in Miami to be tested for anthrax.
Two dead mail handlers worked at Washington's now closed Brentwood mail distribution center, which processes mail for federal agencies and the rest of the city.
The funeral for Thomas Morris of Suitland, Maryland, was held Friday and burial services for Joseph Curseen, of Clinton, Maryland, were Saturday.
Two postal workers and a mailroom employee of the State Department have been diagnosed with the often deadly inhaled form of anthrax and are hospitalized in northern Virginia in serious but stable condition.
In addition, the post office said 23 workers in the Washington area are hospitalized with "suspicious symptoms," but anthrax has not been confirmed.
Several other people were being treated for the less serious skin form of anthrax.
Scattered instances of contamination have been turning up in mail rooms around Washington.
"We don't know if we have cross-contamination from the original Senator Daschle letter or if there is another letter out there that we need to be concerned about," Lieutenant Dan Nichols of the US Capitol Police said Saturday.
The first of about 45 truckloads of Washington mail to be decontaminated began arriving Thursday at a Titan Corp plant in Ohio. The mail is sanitized with radiation. Letters will be put in packages, put on a conveyor belt and irradiated for about five minutes, killing bacteria that might be present.
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