Anthrax tests from two Defense Department mailrooms came back negative, a day after initial testing, which indicated the possible presence of the deadly spores, prompted nearly 900 workers to take precautionary antibiotics.
Responding to what now appear to have been false alarms, officials handed out antibiotics and closed three mail facilities -- two that serve the Pentagon and one in Washington that handles mail on its way to the military.
Officials believe that the confusion stemmed from a mistake at a Defense Department laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Officials there apparently mixed up a sample of actual anthrax that is kept on hand for comparison purposes with the sample taken from the Pentagon mailroom, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.
Later tests proved negative and officials realized their error, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"We had some preliminary results that were positive, but subsequent additional tests have determined that the sample that we had was in fact negative," Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said on Tuesday.
He said all completed tests on samples from both facilities have come back negative, although some additional tests are still incomplete.
"So on that basis we have nothing to suggest anything remotely like the events of October 2001, and we hope that with further information we'll be able to completely rule out any threat at all," he said.
In more than three years since anthrax-by-mail attacks in 2001, scores of initial tests have reported falsely the presence of anthrax in government mailrooms. In this case, however, two alert systems independently suggested the presence of the bacteria, which heightened misgivings and invoked memories of the attacks that killed five and panicked Americans still raw from the Sept. 11 attacks.
Officials became worried after warning signs of anthrax appeared on Monday at two Pentagon mail facilities, in what appears now to have been a coincidence. First, a filter on a device that screens mail for chemical and biological agents on the Pentagon grounds tested positive for anthrax. Separately, an alert was set off at a nearby satellite mail-processing facility.
After receiving results that appeared to confirm the initial readings, officials set out to retest the initial filter and gathered additional samples from the facilities for testing. Every one of those samples came back negative, Winkenwerder said.
"We're very encouraged with the information that we now have in hand," he said.
As a precaution, antibiotics were given to 166 employees at a Washington post office processing center that handles mail before it reaches the Pentagon, and to about 700 workers at the military mailrooms.
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