A trip to the mailbox?
Cleanup of anthrax presents a novel problem
Thursday, October 18, 2001
By ALEX NUSSBAUM
Staff Writer
It's a problem few companies had considered before the past few weeks: how to decontaminate a building exposed to anthrax.
Researchers say simple household cleaners such as bleach or hydrogen peroxide, in the right concentrations, will kill the bacteria.
But that will still leave building owners with questions about detecting spores, protecting office equipment, and convincing jittery workers that it is safe to reenter an office.
"We certainly have the wherewithal to decontaminate known biological or chemical agents," said Brian Kalamanka, whose Denver company manufactures a foam designed for anthrax cleanups. "It's the detection and identification of those agents that's the tricky part."
Such worries and complications are a reality now that anthrax particles have been discovered in tabloid newspaper offices in Florida and congressional offices in Washington, at NBC News, and in the New York governor's office in Manhattan.
After the criminal probes end, cleanup crews will begin the unprecedented process of making the offices habitable again.
The biggest challenge may come in American Media Inc.'s tabloid offices in Boca Raton, Fla., where authorities are uncertain how much of the building is contaminated.
AMI, publisher of the National Enquirer, The Sun, and other papers, said it isn't waiting around. A spokeswoman said this week that it would abandon its quarantined headquarters, even if officials declare it safe.
It's an example of what experts say may be the largest cleanup problem: persuading employees to return to a tainted building.
"Regardless of what the risk is assessed at, people are going to have their own opinion and they are not going to want to go back into that building unless something is done," said Monica Schoch-Spana of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Civilian Biodefense Study.
Experts say it is unlikely anyone could contract the inhaled form of anthrax from spores left behind after the primary release that killed AMI photo editor Robert Stevens and left two other employees with spores in their nasal passages.
"What we've learned is it's the concentration of particles in the first release that makes it deadly," said Schoch-Spana. "That first aerosol puff of cloud that is released is the most concentrated form."
A person must inhale upwards of 10,000 spores to become ill, scientists think. Investigators say they found an unspecified quantity in the building's mailroom and a single spore on Stevens' computer keyboard. But one spore would not have been lethal to anyone, Schoch-Spana said.
High concentrations of bleach or other common cleansers will kill anthrax bacteria, said Michael Tucker, a chemical engineer at the federal government's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Officials in New York have been warning people to wash their hands with soap if they think they might have touched anthrax.
But high doses of bleach or hydrogen peroxide can damage computers, furniture, and other items in an office.
With that in mind, Congress in 1996 asked Sandia to come up with a cleaning solution strong enough to neutralize the residue of chemical and biological agents of terror but gentle enough not to harm upholstery or sicken office workers.
Tucker would not discuss Sandia's formula. But Kalamanka said it combined ingredients of such common items as toothpaste and hair conditioner to produce a clear liquid that kills germs and also cleaves the molecular bonds of chemical weapons like sarin and mustard gas.
Sandia granted manufacturing licenses to two companies last year -- Kalamanka's Modec Inc. of Denver and a business in Alabama. Kalamanka said Modec, whose clients to date have included the military and local governments, has already quadrupled its monthly output -- from 2,000 to 8,000 gallons of the cleaning solution -- in response to the past month's scares.
The anti-anthrax cleaner can be applied as a foam, spray, gel, or mist. Lab tests found that it leaves only 1 spore in 10 million alive, the government reports. It leaves a soapy, but usually invisible, residue on walls and carpets.
That will do the job for most surfaces in a contaminated office, Kalamanka said. Ventilation systems or other hard-to-reach nooks and crannies can be treated with a vaporized version of whatever cleaning agent is chosen.
Cleanups must follow careful tests of an office or building to figure out which areas have been contaminated. If that is impossible, officials may have to guess based on the flow of air and people in a workplace, said Tucker, the Sandia chemical engineer.
Even then, a few stray spores may go missing, or survive the cleaning. That poses what may be the toughest question for officials: how clean is clean enough?
The government has performed mock biological and chemical cleanups on military bases in recent years, usually with success, Tucker said. But what will civilians consider acceptable?
"There are no federal guidelines that say how to certify a building for occupancy after a cleanup from an anthrax attack," Kalamanka said. "Those are things the Centers for Disease Control is looking at right now."
The consensus at Johns Hopkins' bioterrorism think tank is that decontaminating a large urban area or building is not feasible. Instead, the university recommends vaccinating workers or residents, if a vaccine is available.
A trip to the mailbox?