Deadly Delivery

For most of last week, it seemed as though the nation's anthrax outbreak was going to be limited to South Florida--indeed, to just a single building. The hot zone, the headquarters of tabloid publisher American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, had already been sealed off, and its employees and their families were undergoing tests for the dread bacterium. By midweek, one death and two exposures had been reported, but they appeared to be the only casualties. Despite false alarms in Ohio, upstate New York and Hawaii, it looked as though the worst was over.

Then on Friday everything changed. At about midday, authorities reported that one of Tom Brokaw's assistants on the NBC Nightly News in New York City had developed a form of anthrax as well, possibly from something contained in mail she had handled a couple of weeks earlier. And even as New York City and federal executives went on television to urge the public to remain calm, word began to circulate that the third-floor newsroom at the New York Times, just 10 blocks from the NBC studios, had been evacuated. Reason: a Times reporter had opened an envelope that morning, pulled out what is described as a "threatening letter"--and watched a puff of white powder disperse into the air.

Similar scares swept the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio and the rural biweekly Dickson Herald in Tennessee. Fox News in New York revealed that a letter addressed to its president, Roger Ailes--opened, as was Brokaw's letter, by an assistant--had also contained a mysterious white powder. And in Reno, Nev., officials said a letter returned to a Microsoft Corp. office from Malaysia, apparently having been intercepted and tampered with, had initially tested positive for traces of anthrax.

Copycats tend to come out of the woodwork at times like these, and no evidence has yet been found that ties any of the anthrax scares to the tragic events of Sept. 11--unless you count the fact that a man suspected of involvement with hijackers had a paid subscription to the Globe, an American Media tabloid. The newly opened FBI investigation into the NBC incident is independent, so far, of the probe in Boca Raton. But at least two of the incidents appear to be related: the letter to the Times and one of two sent to NBC both had St. Petersburg, Fla., postmarks, and both were addressed in a similar unsteady scrawl. Neither appeared to contain anthrax, however; the infectious letter at NBC turned out to be a different envelope, with a Trenton, N.J., postmark. The Times letter is being retested, since overnight assays like the one that initially cleared it are sometimes wrong. After three inconclusive tests, in fact, the Microsoft letter was declared positive last Saturday afternoon. That made three confirmed anthrax attacks: at Microsoft, NBC and American Media.