Amerithrax (36 page)
Postal worker Leroy Richmond was discharged from the hospital the same day as Hose. Richmond now suffered from memory problems. His wife, Susan, initially believed he was just getting old, “but it’s not normal for him, in the middle of a conversation, to say he can’t remember what the ques- tions were.” Richmond put up a front, trying to be “brave and strong.” He agreed to a series of memory tests to regain some of his mental acuity.
Norma Wallace, released from the hospital after eighteen days, returned home. Like Richmond, she often found her- self losing her train of thought in midsentence. Wallace re- sumed her correspondence courses for a B.A. in literature. Studying might aid her memory. “That’s one reason why I stick with school,” she said. “It forces me to focus and try to remember.” Like the other inhalational anthrax survivors she suffered from joint pain in her shoulders, hips, and an- kles. She might not ever be able to return to work. Wallace
was so exhausted, she had to do her chores in twenty-minute segments, then take a rest.
Her coworker Jyotsna Patel had chronic fatigue too, along with the same joint pain and memory loss. She had been hospitalized for eight days. She only received a diag- nosis of inhalational anthrax on October 26, the day she was discharged on a course of doxycycline. After her return home, she often woke up screaming in the middle of the night from nightmares. “The frustration is she is not getting better at the rate she should be,” her husband, Ramesh Patel, told reporters. “What makes me really mad is they still haven’t been able to find out who did this.” That Amerithrax remained at large only intensified the victims’ stress.
The sole exception was Ernie Blanco. “I feel good,” he told the press. “I remember everything. I feel 100 percent fine. Honest to God, you won’t believe me, but I almost feel better than before.” Experts wondered why the others were not back to normal and why an elderly man had recovered so completely. Was the reason partially emotional? Wallace, Patel, Richmond, and Hose might be experiencing post- traumatic stress syndrome because the acts were those of a terrorist. The intense media attention was another emotional consequence.
Meanwhile, some of the injured postal employees reached out for compensation for their injuries in the line of duty. On November 9, the Office of Workers’ Compensation Pro- grams explained to workers about anthrax and OWCP cov- erage.
This Office has received a number of inquiries. Unless and until you have been diagnosed with anthrax or pos- sible anthrax exposure you will not be entitled to benefits under the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act. [The OWCP] has no statutory authority to pay for routine screening or preventative services, because the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act only provides for medical treatment of an actual injury or occupational disease. However, preventative care can be authorized by OWCP when there is probable exposure to a known contaminant,
thereby requiring disease-specific measures against in- fection.
Currently the USPS and CDC provide necessary med- ical testing and time on-the-clock to receive this screen- ing in offices that are suspected of infection under regulations set forth in 5 U.S.C. 7901. If you are not an employee in any of the offices under investigation, any testing or time off of work that you incur getting tested will be at your own expense and on your own time. Bills should be submitted to your health insurance carrier and time off should be charged to annual or sick leave. Please note that a positive test today will only support that you were not recently exposed. Regular testing would be re- quired to support a clean bill of health... When a Fed- eral employee tests positive for anthrax exposure, and this exposure likely occurred in the workplace, a claim can be submitted to OWCP. The office can authorize payment for the treatment rendered to prevent illness.
Doctors had little to go by when faced with treating pa- tients for inhalational anthrax. Their slim folder of studies was limited to the odd cases of millworkers who had inhaled spores from contaminated wool long ago. Little was known about anthrax’s long-term effects. The CDC’s scientists av- idly studied blood samples from the Capitol Hill victims, attempting to understand the disease and develop improved anthrax vaccines. Their theory was that anthrax produces toxins that could impact nerve tissues. Because of Hose’s contamination and that of the State Department mail center, officials suspected another anthrax letter existed—some- where. It had just been announced that four more facilities in New Jersey had tested positive for anthrax, two more in Pennsylvania, one in West Windsor, and a second regional processing center in Bellmawr. All were linked to Hamilton in some way.
“This is a learning curve for everybody,” said a senior FBI official. “Every single day, if not hourly, we’re all learn- ing something about this. If you take several weeks back, the learning curve, we were all behind it.”
President Bush spoke in Atlanta to assure Americans that
On Monday, November 12, Dr. Jerry Weisfogel, a doctor working in Kendall Park, New Jersey, told a television au- dience that he may have been the first person infected with anthrax. His symptoms (mainly a sore with a black scab) had appeared a week before the terror attacks of 9-11, but were diagnosed at a hospital as being meningitis. Kendall Park was near Franklin Park, the town mentioned on the Daschle letter’s return address along with a nonexistent “4th Grade, Greendale School.” There was a Green
brook
School in Weisfogel’s town that only went to the fourth grade.“It obviously made me think that there may have been some local connection between where my office is,” Dr. Weisfogel said, “and wherever the perpetrators of the an- thrax mailings are.” He wondered if Amerithrax might have been in his office. “Have I come across patients from coun- tries who might be doing this? Yes.” He told ABC he may have had a brush with the anthrax attacker, but the govern- ment had ignored his story. It’s “a possible lead” in a case with almost no leads, he said, other than a trail of anthrax infections and spores reaching all the way back to New Jer- sey. The next day, after the CDC became aware that Weis- fogel had told his story to
Good Morning America
, the agency tested his blood for anthrax antibodies. He was told it could be weeks before the results of the tests were avail- able.Letterborne spores had spread far more widely than any- one could have predicted and continued to defy expecta- tions. The inhalational form of anthrax took twenty-five hundred to ten thousand spores to seed a pulmonary infec- tion. Even a dozen bacterial spores could cause cutaneous anthrax if they got into a small cut. Traces of anthrax were
found at four more New Jersey post offices and linked to Hamilton, which remained closed.
“We learned a lot,” said John Nolan, deputy postmaster general, at a briefing at the Postal Service’s L’Enfant Plaza headquarters in Washington. He explained the Daschle let- ter, which passed through the Hamilton facility on October 9 on its way to the Hart Senate Office Building, had pro- vided the most information so far. That letter might have been responsible for seven illnesses—three workers at Ham- ilton in the sorting area (two who contracted inhalation an- thrax and one the cutaneous form) and four workers at Brentwood processing facility, who contracted inhalational anthrax. Two other workers had become sick, but experts still didn’t know how. One was a resident of Hamilton Township who developed cutaneous anthrax, but had no connection with the post office.
Mail began to be treated like toxic waste. Compared to the same period in the previous year, the U.S. Postal Ser- vice’s revenues were down 4 percent. Even Federal Express and United Parcel Service took a hit. Many consumers be- gan to handle bills electronically and to use faxes or e-mail more. Many were just not opening their mail.
Joe Holiday, a Branch 142 mail carrier, had delivered mail for thirty-four years, eleven months and five days. “There’s no point in me panicking. Somebody’s got to de- liver the mail,” he said. While carriers wore gloves and masks when putting up the mail, they didn’t do so on the street. “What message would that send to our customers?” Holiday asked. “I’ve got to look and be careful and check every envelope” before putting it through a slot into some- one’s home. “That’s my job, my duty.”
“In some ways,” said a suburban D.C. letter carrier, “it’s like the public just noticed us. Now they don’t take us for granted.” Carriers were left notes from their customers, a few signed only by their zip code:
Our community, and many others would like to thank you for your hard and courageous work... No matter the circumstances you have pursued your duties and proved to the world that you are strong, brave and ready
To our mail carrier: In these difficult and sad times, we just wanted to let you know that we appreciate and admire the job that you and your colleagues are doing. We are all in this together and we will get through it together! Thank you and God Bless, Marisa and Vinny.
A twenty-two-year veteran of Massachusetts Northeast Merged Branch 25 said, “More people are actually touching you, giving you a pat on the back, telling you ‘good job,’ ‘be careful,’ ‘God bless.’ I even had one older lady on my route come out with a bunch of plastic gloves that she wanted me to wear to keep safe.”
Branch President Jerry DePoe wrote a letter to the mail carriers too:
For the past month you have put your life in jeopardy simply by doing your job. Letter carriers will not allow a faceless coward to keep them from their rounds. Open message to all terrorists—letter carriers are not afraid of you.
Anthrax scares still swept the country. At a time of na- tional terror and mourning, anthrax-laced letters had added to the panic. Across the nation any spill of mysterious powder closed freeways and halted flights. Authorities offered a
$1.25 million reward leading to Amerithrax’s arrest. Emer- gency response teams and the National Guard ran drills sim- ulating how they would respond to a chemical disaster attack. The government strengthened management of medical stock- piles. There was designation of a new cabinet-level position for Homeland Security to integrate government-wide efforts. Then an aged widow in Connecticut’s Housatonic Valley became another puzzling mystery. Anthrax had gotten into her lungs too. Ottilie W. Lundgren fell ill a week before Thanksgiving. The ninety-four-year-old widow rarely left
Thousands of microbes multiplied in a few hours. They teemed venomously in what, for her age, had been robust tissues, choking her arteries and turning red blood a sinister black. The green sticks and tangled skeins of anthrax threads were like the needles and yarn of her knitting. A widened mediastinum showed on her chest radiograph.
Mrs. Lundgren’s illness was as mysterious as Nguyen’s. Where and how had she inhaled the fatal spores? She was the only person in her town to become infected, though in- dividual susceptibility was always part of the anthrax equa- tion. Researchers in anthrax bioweapons recalled one super test-chimpanzee surviving one huge dose of anthrax after another before finally succumbing. Eventually even the most hardy succumb.
A CDC team investigating her house discovered several bags of rotting garbage. She rarely took out her trash. If Amerithrax had mailed the widow a letter, as he had Brokaw and Daschle, then it probably was still there. It wasn’t. What mail there was tested clean. In fact medical detectives never found a single anthrax spore in Lundgren’s home. They still suspected her mail was the source. Past experience told them as much. But how to prove it?
Investigators pored over data from the Southern Con- necticut Processing and Distribution Center in Wallingford, the sorting facility closest to Lundgren’s house. But they could find no record of suspicious letters addressed to her, said Dr. David L. Swerdlow, a CDC epidemiologist in- volved in the work. Wallingford had first been tested with
Dr. Kenneth Dobuler of the Griffin Hospital in Derby questioned Lundgren on Wednesday, November 21, the same day Wallingford was retested with wet swabs. The results were negative again. “I asked whether she had come in contact with domestic or wild animals, whether she’d been gardening,” said Dr. Dobuler. “I asked if she’d opened any suspicious mail. But my interview with her was unre- vealing.” She died the same day.
Her case was so bewildering that experts began to won- der if they really understood the disease at all. The FBI and CDC began backtracking Lundgren’s movements outside her home. Would the enigma of her death lead back to the sender? “What about the diner where she used to eat?” locals suggested to them. “And wasn’t there an anthrax outbreak on a nearby farm fifty years ago?” Tough, durable anthrax spores could easily last that long. That theory led them no- where.