Posted on 08/16/2003 4:44:47 PM PDT by genefromjersey
August 16, 2003 at 9:11AM CDT
Arkansas Letter Contained Anthrax Traces
By Caryn Rousseau
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A letter delivered to a Little Rock family nearly two years ago contained small traces of anthrax, apparently from a New Jersey mail-processing center that handled other tainted letters, the state Health Department said Friday.
The family, which was not identified, is healthy and has no record of anthrax-related illnesses, the department said in a news release.
The FBI asked the department last week to test the letter after obtaining it in the criminal investigation into four anthrax-laced letters mailed in September and October 2001.
The FBI said the tainted letters were processed at a postal center near Trenton, N.J., and the Arkansas letter apparently was contaminated by one of the other four.
An FBI office in New Jersey asked Little Rock agents to obtain the letter as part of a random sample of mail that went through the postal facility on Oct. 9, 2001.
Postal service employees who may have had contact with the letter are meeting with authorities. But the department said preliminary reports indicate no one has become ill from exposure to the letter.
"Other than our lab personnel, the last direct contact with the letter was over 16 months ago," said Dr. Faye Boozman, the department director. "The last contact by postal workers was 22 months ago. Because the symptoms of anthrax infection occur within seven to 42 days of exposure, we are confident the health risk to any individual is negligible. We're months beyond the time when any potential illness might have occurred."
Nancy Rosenstein, a doctor with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said there is little or no reason for Arkansans to worry that they have contaminated letters from the same time period.
"We have detected no - that's zero - cases of anthrax that have occurred since the attacks in 2001," she said.
The Postal Service processing center in Little Rock has undergone several improvements since the anthrax attacks and tests for signs of anthrax spores were negative in November 2001.
The answer is pretty much "yes".
What "they" are doing is using invisible ink to write information on the backs of letters. This is in turn read at the next stage of processing.
All of this operating information, including your scanned address, is "kept". Later on when it is discovered that you might have been subject to an anthrax attack, they can actually discover exactly who the people are who were most directly affected. What we have here is a letter that was "contaminated" by another source of anthrax. This could be from another letter, or from the letter tray in which this one resided for a while.
Source: Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2001.
Special Report: Aftermath of Terror
Anthrax Puzzle Persists as Letter in Chile Looks Different From Those Found in U.S. By JOSE DECORDOBA and MARK SCHOOFS. Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The doctor in Chile who received an anthrax-contaminated letter last week said the envelope doesn't resemble those sent to two senators and to media outlets in the U.S. -- adding another mystery to those already surrounding the anthrax investigation.
Antonio Banfi, a pediatrician in Santiago, Chile, said the envelope bore the return address of a medical publishing house in Orlando, Fla., that regularly sends him material. A spokeswoman for Mosby Inc., a unit of Reed Elsevier PLC, confirmed it was listed as the return address and said the company was "fully cooperating" with investigators.
The address was typed, rather than handwritten, with a clear plastic window for the address. Dr. Banfi said he didn't open the letter; he was suspicious because it bore a Zurich postmark even though it had the Orlando return address. He said he didn't know why he would receive such a letter. "Fate," he said.
The anthrax letters found in the U.S. have all borne Trenton, N.J., postmarks and were addressed in the same handwriting, authorities have said.
A Florida state laboratory that works closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed last week that the letter contained anthrax spores. The Atlanta headquarters of the CDC was still waiting Monday to receive a sample of the bacterium itself in order to test whether the strain matches that present in other letters. U.S. investigators still haven't examined the letter; they have received only a poor-quality photograph of the envelope, which they say makes it difficult to glean any information.
"We want to get our hands on this thing and see if it matches up" with the other letters, said Dan Mihalko, inspector in charge of congressional and public affairs for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. "Are there envelopes in Switzerland somebody stole or envelopes that were stolen in Florida? There are just too many questions here."
An official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the agency had no evidence that the letter had actually been mailed from Orlando. The letter could have been mailed from the U.S. and still received a Zurich postmark if it was processed by Swiss Post International (USA Inc.), a subsidiary of the Swiss post office. Swiss Post, with offices in New York and Los Angeles, is a wholesaler that handles overseas mail for about 30 U.S. businesses, said Michael Knorr, the company's director. Swiss Post is awaiting more information on the letter before deciding whether to test its facilities for anthrax, and Mr. Knorr said the company hasn't heard from the FBI or other investigators. Mosby officials Monday night said they couldn't determine if the company uses Swiss Post.
Also Monday, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft confirmed that the FBI warned the oil and gas industry 10 days to two weeks ago of a possible terrorist attack on natural-gas facilities in the U.S. He said authorities had received "an uncorroborated report of undetermined reliability about natural gas. Mike Shanahan, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, said the group received an alert just before Thanksgiving that said: "We have received uncorroborated information that Osama bin Laden may have approved plans to attack natural gas supplies in the United States. ... Such an attack would allegedly take place in the event that either bin Ladin or Taliban leader Mullah Omar are either captured or killed." But Mr. Ashcroft said he didn't think that al Qaeda would necessarily need Mr. bin Laden's capture or death to trigger more acts of terrorism in the U.S.
The appearance of the Chile anthrax letter gives investigators a new sample to compare with the previous ones to see if they are all from the same strain. The CDC has said that the strain of anthrax that infected and killed 94-year-old Ottilie Lundgren of Connecticut was "indistinguishable" from those that were mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and several media outlets. But that doesn't mean that the strains are positively the same. Instead, it means that a preliminary test comparing eight parts of the bacterium's DNA found no differences.
Additional tests have been performed on the anthrax mailed to Sen. Daschle and to NBC-TV news anchor Tom Brokaw, and no differences were found even after those extra tests. But the CDC is still planning more extensive tests on the anthrax that killed Ms. Lundgren and Bronx victim Kathy Nguyen.
Those cases merit close scrutiny because they break from the earlier pattern. Neither woman worked for the postal service, a media company or a government agency, and investigators have been unable to identify a possible source for their infection. "You would want to look at the outliers as sensitively as you can to see if there are any differences," said Mitchell Cohen, director of the CDC's division of bacterial and mycotic diseases. He said his agency is developing more sensitive "fingerprinting" techniques to find differences among anthrax samples.
If more-exhaustive tests were to show biological differences, that might give investigators additional clues. For example, said Paul Keim, an anthrax expert who is a professor of microbiology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, subtle genetic differences might indicate that the perpetrators didn't make each dose from the same "seed stock," but instead sequentially used each batch to make the next. Exhaustive genetic fingerprinting "might tell us how they handled" the anthrax, he said. The Ames strain that has killed all five of the victims to date does occur in nature, but is very rare.
Dr. Keim, who developed the test used by the CDC to distinguish the strains, estimates that there are more than a thousand variable regions in the DNA of anthrax. In the initial tests done to identify the strains of anthrax samples, eight stretches of DNA were compared -- enough to be labeled indistinguishable when they matched up.
The method is a bit like identifying a person by taking tailoring measurements -- inseam, collar, hatband and so forth. Very rarely would two people have identical measurements for eight different parts of their bodies; when criminal labs identify people based on DNA, they compare just 13 variable regions of human DNA in a process similar to the one Dr. Keim uses for anthrax. Unless they are twins, the chance two people would match up on all 13 regions is almost zero.
But is it possible that two anthrax strains might be different even if the eight variable regions match up? "Absolutely," said Dr. Keim. "We've done that where we've had identical patterns with eight, but as we go deeper we tear that apart."
The FBI also said it is monitoring the investigation of the disappearance of a Harvard biologist, Don C. Wiley, an expert in Ebola, HIV and influenza, though the agency doesn't have a reason to believe there is any connection to anthrax. Mr. Wiley's rental car was found on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which runs over the Mississippi River and links Tennessee and Arkansas, at 4 a.m. Nov. 16 with a full tank of fuel and the key in the ignition.
A senior FBI official in Washington, D.C., said the agency is interested in the disappearance because of Mr. Wiley's standing in the science community. "Considering our concern over bioterrorism, any disappearance like this would raise eyebrows," the official said, but he added, "however, there isn't any evidence that a crime has occurred."
-- Gary Fields, Rick Brooks and Jerry Markon contributed to this article.
Knowing the surface transportation routes is useless in this analysis because First Class Mail will be carried by air to meet existing service standards (e.g. 2 day).
Actually, mail that is cancelled by the cancelling machine gets that flourescent orange 'ID-tag' in the back. It represents the date, time machine number and 'sequence' number of the piece cancelled. Since the date is only 2 digits, it doesn't show the month. That flourescent tag identifies the piece so that if it doesn't have a barcode on it, an image of the address can be sent to an optical character reader to code it. The delivery point zip-code that is assigned to that piece is maintained electronically so that any downstream machine that gets that piece of mail (even across the country) can get that zip-code result and sort the piece correctly.
The sequence number in the ID tag represents the position in the stream of cancelled mail (2,349th, 2,350th, etc) so that different pieces cancelled within the same minute get separate numbers (it cancells 700 pieces a minute). The computer records would indicate the sequence numbers of surrounding pieces, and the delivery point bar code results that are electronically matched would identify where those surrounding pieces were going.
It's nothing sinister, just part of the efforts in the 90's to improve the speed and accuracy of the automated mail processing system. The 'photographing' (capturing a gray-scale image) is to allow the computer systems that can code the mail to do so while the mail is being moved within the facility. Those images are not stored even to the next day - the memory required would be too great. All that is stored is the ID tag information, along with the zip-code result of the address - no names, return address, or anything like that.
Dr. Don C. Wiley,........Children's West Nile (Egyptian connections) Virus expert?
/sarcasm
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