Anthrax Nation
There are few things as universal as the mail. And that's why we worry now when the postman rings. Should we?
The enemy is no longer just bearded men in robes talking tough from hidden caves or suicidal fanatics grabbing our airplanes. Now, the enemy may be anyone who can lick a stamp and seal an envelope. Just over a dozen Americans have contracted anthrax-by-mail, and only three have died, but a current of fear and apprehension is now surging through the nation.
The Bush administration, which had sought to gain the initiative by dropping bombs on and inserting ground troops into Afghanistan, could report little payoff and was instead forced not only to play defense but to play on its home court: The frontline soldiers in the war on terrorism were supposed to be men in cammies, well armed, well trained, and well protected. Instead, the battlefield is turning out to be America's postal facilities, where the workers are girded in nothing more than blue slacks, short-sleeve shirts, and sensible shoes.
With anthrax spores showing up in mail facilities around Washington, D.C., and New York, the Postal Service ordered anthrax testing at 200 mail centers along the East Coast and random checks around the country. Postal workers in New York demanded the closing of an anthrax-contaminated sorting center and the shutdown of other postal installations. "If it's possible to close down Congress and test there for bacteria," said William Smith, a union local president in New York City, where anthrax was found on four machines at a major sorting center, "they should close down this building, too."
Baffled. The White House response was, at first, halting and confused. "It's something that, obviously, we're not used to in America," President Bush said at the weekend. Public-health authorities seem baffled that anthrax could escape from a sealed envelope and were slow to realize that modern, high-speed postal equipment might force the spores from the letters into the air, endangering postal workers. But it's not as if they didn't have fair warning. For the past three years, abortion clinics have been receiving letters containing powdery substances that the senders claimed to be anthrax. None actually were, but evidently nobody prepared for the day when the mails would be used to send the real thing. The number of people infected remains tiny, but the Washington Post raised the question as to whether "the U.S. mail stream as a whole at some point might need to be deemed potentially deadly."
Better hope not. That stream is a veritable Mississippi. The Postal Service delivers about 680 million pieces of mail each day, and about 7 million Americans visit a post office daily. The Postal Service is scrambling now to come up with ways to irradiate and sanitize the mail, but the process is both expensive and difficult to adapt to the huge volume the post office handles. Anthrax doesn't have to be deadly, of course. Caught in time, it can be cured by antibiotics like Cipro, which many Americans are now popping as if they were Pez, a strategy they might want to rethink in light of a Wall Street Journal story that warns that drugs like Cipro "can cause a range of bizarre side effects from psychological problems and seizures to ruptured Achilles tendons." As if Americans didn't have psychological problems enough already: We are being warned, for instance, to watch out for the "flulike symptoms" of anthrax just as we head into the season for the flu, a disease that could kill far more Americans--about 20,000 this year--than anthrax might.
The difference is that nobody is trying to murder us with the flu, and those mailing out anthrax, especially the altered, highly deadly form sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, are. But who are these death-by-mail terrorists? The identities of the September 11 hijackers were known within hours, but the anthrax mailers remain a mystery, even though theories abound. A U.S. official told U.S. News that it is "the FBI's hunch that a single, homegrown terrorist--maybe foreign born--may have been sending out all these letters." Bioterrorism expert Gary Eifried says the sophistication of the anthrax sent to Daschle does not, as some first speculated, necessarily point to a foreign country. "He had to be a biochemist or microbiologist," Eifried says, "not just some guy off the street," but the anthrax could have been developed in a laboratory located at a local college in the United States.
Germ doctors. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters Friday that the high-powered anthrax sent to Daschle had to have been "produced by a Ph.D. microbiologist, and it would have to have been done in a small, well-equipped microbiology lab," but that it could be foreign or domestic. U.S. intelligence has yet to make a determination on the origin. "We have not ruled out it being a biological Unabomber or some fringe domestic group," says one U.S. official. "We are also not ruling out the possibility of overseas involvement." But Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official, says that some officials are leaning toward a domestic source for the terrorism. "I don't think there is anything that says this can't be done in the United States by someone with some expertise and access to a research lab," he says.
President Bush said that he didn't yet know who the anthrax mailers are but seemed to indicate that anyone that evil could not be American. "We don't know yet," he told business, trade, and agricultural leaders meeting in the East Room of the White House. "But we do know the evil one who thinks in ways that we can't possibly think in America--so destructive, such a low regard for human life. And anybody who puts anthrax, trying to kill American citizens, shares the same set of values." One official close to the case says, "They're operating on the theory that this was a second wave of attacks." Among the leads being pursued: Arab-Americans with backgrounds in biotech, medicine, and pharmacology in the New Jersey area (the Daschle letter and a letter sent to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw were postmarked Trenton, N.J.); people who obtained large prescriptions of Cipro before September 11; and associates of the hijackers and other extremists. Last August, Gregg Chatterton, a pharmacist at Huber Healthmart Drugs in Delray Beach, Fla., says two men he later identified as Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, two of the September 11 suicide hijackers, wandered into his pharmacy. Chatterton approached the men to see if they needed any help and noticed Atta's hands were flaming red. "Both hands were red from the wrist down," recalls Chatterton. "If you filled your sink with bleach and stuck your hands in there for six hours, they would come out red," he says, "and that is what they looked like." Chatterton thought the two men might have been construction workers, who often get red, irritated hands, or perhaps Atta had been gardening and had an allergic reaction. "I asked [Atta] if he had done any gardening," says Chatterton, "and he was very rude and just pooh-poohed me. He said: `I don't garden.' " Chatterton finally sold Atta a 1-ounce tube of "acid mantle," a medication that helps replenish your skin, says Chatterton. Shehhi also bought a bottle of Robitussin for what Chatterton described as a hacking cough. Chatterton believes Atta's red hands were a result of frequent washing with bleach, perhaps, or some other chemical. Chatterton had seen many photographs of cutaneous anthrax when he served on the infectious control committee of several local hospitals. "It did not look like cutaneous anthrax," he says. Chatterton described the two men as "well dressed and well groomed" but very rude. "It was like meeting Hitler," he says of Atta. A Czech cabinet minister Friday became the first official to publicly acknowledge that Atta also met with an Iraqi intelligence agent during a trip to the Czech Republic several weeks before the agent was expelled on April 22. Government officials told the Associated Press that the agent, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, had been under surveillance by Czech intelligence, who believe he might have been involved in plotting an attack on the headquarters of Radio Free Europe.
Back in America, however, there was good news: Guacamole won't kill you. With Americans taking more antidepressants, mental health emergency hotlines in New York are getting twice the usual number of calls; people are jumping a foot and calling authorities every time they see anything slightly suspicious. By the end of last week, more than 4,600 incidents around the country had been reported to postal inspectors and when, in Chicago, some people noticed a "suspicious" green goo on the sidewalk, a hazmat team was quickly called in. The team just as quickly determined the substance was a decidedly nondeadly form of guacamole. "Guacamole is not dangerous," said Mayor Richard M. Daley, in a quotation that may go down in history. "It's good for you. People have to start calming down. I know they're worried. But they can't overreact. . . . We have to start using some common sense."
The postman rings. But what is common sense in a world where merely touching an envelope can give you a deadly disease? Attorney General John Ashcroft sought comfort in statistics. "Two hundred million people opened their mail last week and nobody died," he said. But for some Americans the postman doesn't have to ring twice--once is more than enough. Robert Greene, 35, a mail carrier in Northwest Washington, D.C., has begun wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask when he delivers the mail. "Some people don't even want their mail," he says. "I just take it back." Brent Hopkins, a programmer for Citibank in New York, says, "I'm definitely scared. With my home mail, I get my mail but leave it in a pile and open it every three or four days. I don't really think anyone's going to address any anthrax to me. But, yeah, it's that thought: What if that's it? At work, I get a lot of packages, CDs and books that I order online. And for some reason those scare me a little. It's like, you never know what's inside until you open it up, and by then it'd be too late anyway." Greeting card companies are worried as we head into the Christmas season, and Hallmark is considering bringing out a line of Christmas postcards. "If one of the terrorists' major aims is to scare a population, they've done that," says spokeswoman Rachel Bolton. She also urges people to "use your own handwriting and include your name and return address" on any letter or card they send.
So far, the threat of anthrax doesn't seem to have added to economic worry. Consumer sentiment has held up remarkably well after its initial drop following September 11. And U.S. stocks--another sign of economic faith--have gained in four of the past five weeks. But in the area where it counts--buying stuff--consumers have pulled back. Existing-home sales fell 11.7 percent in September; new-home sales were down 1.4 percent. And U.S. businesses are pulling back as profits plunge: Durable goods orders fell 8.5 percent. Americans may not feel worse about the economy than they felt in late September, but "the public is rationing itself," says Brookings Institution visiting scholar Helmut Sonnenfeldt. Who can blame them? With blue-chip companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Eastman Kodak piling on more layoff announcements last week, U.S. consumers now understand that anthrax is one kind of terror-related threat; layoffs are another.
"The psychological impact of a chemical or biological weapon is much greater than the physical impact," says terrorism expert Eifried. "People understand explosions. They understand buildings collapsing. But they don't understand this. Not everyone lives in a tall building or flies on a plane. Everyone gets mail."
Dr. Anna Johnson-Winegar, special assistant for biochemical defenses to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told U.S. News that she has recommended to top Defense and Justice department officials that all postal workers, fire, police, and all other first responders, as well as military personnel, be vaccinated for anthrax and smallpox, as a "prophylactic response." Says Dr. Johnson-Winegar: "I am personally a believer in vaccination. For many bioterror agents, particularly smallpox, I think this country needs to rethink its policies."
Armed with a new set of antiterrorism laws passed last week that will make it easier for law enforcement agencies to find and arrest terrorists, President Bush said, "This legislation is essential not only to pursuing and punishing terrorists but also preventing more atrocities in the hands of the evil ones. This government will enforce this law with all the urgency of a nation at war. The elected branches of our government, and both political parties, are united in our resolve to fight and stop and punish those who would do harm to the American people."
But until that day, the land of the free is going to have to be the home of the brave.
With Jodie T. Allen, Chitra Ragavan, Kevin Whitelaw, Douglas Pasternak, David E. Kaplan, Kit R. Roane and Jeff Howe
This story appears in the November 5, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.