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.

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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.

Yet no matter what the final, definitive tests show, it is striking how many of these attacks--real and false--were directed at media companies. Having attacked America's financial and military centers on Sept. 11, the al-Qaeda terror network might well be tempted to hit the nation's media--which manage to embody both freedom and excess. Is al-Qaeda trying to panic U.S. journalists into doing the terrorists' work for them, spreading the fear that has now hit them where they work? Addressing the possibility that the anthrax scare is a follow-up to the attack on the World Trade Center, Vice President Dick Cheney wondered aloud, "Are they related? We don't know. We don't have enough evidence to be able to pin down that kind of connection. But...we have to be suspicious."

If this was a coordinated terrorist assault, though, it was pretty ineffectual. Given anthrax's lethal potential, an assault that caused one death, one nonfatal infection and two noninfectious exposures (a number that had risen to seven by Saturday, said American Media, though federal health officials wouldn't confirm it) is like the Sept. 11 hijackers' commandeering a motorcycle and driving it into a telephone booth. "Get real," says a photographer who works for tabloid newspapers. "If this was a terrorist incident, they would have put it in the ventilating system, and 400 people would have anthrax right now."

Not everyone is taking the matter so casually. The public, sensitized to the horrors of bioterrorism by weeks of government warnings and media coverage, was ready to assume the worst. Even though a mass attack is considered unlikely, doctors in South Florida and New York have been besieged with demands for ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, the only antibiotic specifically approved for treating anthrax. Police all over the U.S. have been fielding calls reporting suspicious substances; on Friday a single precinct in New York City responded to three different alerts, quarantining one building in lower Manhattan for two hours. The city's emergency rooms were besieged as well. "There's a lot of anxiety," reports Dr. Marc Stoller of the city's Beth Israel Medical Center.

Since two of the Florida victims worked in American Media's mailroom, postal workers who sorted and delivered the company's mail have also been tested, and Postal Service employees are demanding blanket testing for everyone in the Boca Raton-area post offices. Mail clerks in half a dozen other cities with anthrax scares were also tested, and media outlets--including TIME--temporarily shut down mailrooms while they scrambled to beef up security. The Postal Service has issued new guidelines on how to do that (examples: don't open any mail on which the postmark and return address don't match; don't open unexpected mail from someone you don't know, especially if the address is handwritten). The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control, meanwhile, are trying to get a handle on the scope of the problem and beginning the painstaking detective work that could pin down the source--or sources--of the bugs used in the attacks.