WASHINGTON (REUTERS) — Anthrax turned up in a Pentagon post office and authorities delayed using a potent gas to decontaminate a Senate office building Monday, while scientists unveiled a DNA test that could speed detection of the dangerous germ-warfare bacterium.
Hospital worker and Vietnamese immigrant Kathy Nguyen, the fourth person to die of anthrax since Oct. 5, was mourned in a funeral service in New York City as authorities remained baffled about how she contracted the disease.
But Norma Wallace, a New Jersey postal worker who beat the most deadly form of anthrax, offered words of encouragement as she checked out of a hospital. A State Department employee still hospitalized in Virginia with inhalation anthrax made sufficient improvement to be taken out of intensive care.
A spate of letters laced with powdery anthrax spores has been sent by unknown perpetrators through the U.S. Mail since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. There have been 17 confirmed anthrax cases in what President Bush has called a second wave of terrorism after the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 4,800 people.
Authorities said traces of anthrax were found in two mail rental boxes at a public post office located inside the Pentagon, which was damaged on Sept. 11 by a hijacked airliner. The post office was decontaminated, and no further signs of the spores were found.
The post office was examined because its mail comes from the central processing facility in Washington that handled an anthrax-tainted letter to Senate Majority Leader
Tom Daschle last month. Two employees at that facility died of anthrax.
The Pentagon post office is used by many of the 23,000 military and civilian workers at the mammoth Defense Department headquarters in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac River from Washington.
Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood said the two positive samples at the post office were among 17 taken at the facility Oct. 30 and were found in two rental mailboxes, one unassigned and one rented by a sailor who is being tested for possible anthrax exposure. The facility was decontaminated over the weekend and remained closed despite being given a clean bill of health, authorities said.
Anthrax has been found in numerous other federal buildings and post offices across the Washington area.
Cleanup delay at Senate office building
The tainted letter sent to Daschle was opened Oct. 15 in his office in the Hart Senate Office Building, which is set to remain shut until completion of a cleanup by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The cleanup had been expected to end Nov. 13, but EPA spokesman Patrick Boyle said plans to decontaminate the entire Hart building with chlorine dioxide gas have been shelved due to concerns expressed by some experts that the method would not work on such a large scale.
“They concur with the technology of gassing but are skeptical it would be effective in a large building like that and that there could be other problems associated with it. They suggested we proceed more incrementally and not gas the building in one fell swoop,” Boyle said.
Boyle also said the EPA had begun using “more standard technology,” such as wiping with bleach.
“That’s not to say we are going to rule out the use of the gas, but basically, the decision has not been made to do that full-scale,” he added.