The Hunt For The Anthrax Killers

The

awful truth about hunting for a serial killer is that the most important clues usually come at the expense of more lives. Last week the odious spores managed to kill the messengers before they even knew what ailed them. But postal workers Joseph Curseen Jr., 47, and Thomas Morris Jr., 53, still delivered the message. Think bigger, Curseen and Morris told us. The only thing more elusive than the terrorists are the microscopic weapons they have unleashed. The baby-powder- like substance in the letter opened on Capitol Hill on Oct. 15 does not respect laws and traditions such as gravity and envelopes. So authorities must not continue to abide by the old rules that put public calm before caution, process before speed.

A 61-year-old New York hospital worker with inhalation anthrax died Wednesday. Officials are trying to puzzle out her link to any contaminated letters NIH officials say they are "intensively investigating" the possibility that private homes are being targeted for anthrax contamination via the U.S. mail Two more postal facilities in Washington tested positive for anthrax; workers are urged to being antibiotic treatment as soon as possible

Up until last week, the patchwork of government agencies scrambling to hold hands and surround the bad guys did what it has always done. The FBI has been keeping secrets. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been waiting for someone to get sick before intervening. And the U.S. Postal Service has been delivering the mail and enraging its employees. Just like old times. A close look at the sequence of events leading up to Curseen's and Morris's deaths reveals several points at which authorities could have recognized the risk to postal workers and taken action. But due to a tragic combination of overconfidence, stoicism, genuine confusion and fear of causing panic, those opportunities were missed. Immediately after Sept. 11, which was not as long ago as it seems, the Federal Government was roundly criticized for its failure to imagine the worst. That seems to be precisely what happened again this time.

So far, the biggest leads have come from the crime-scene evidence: the tiny spores of anthrax and the letters that accompanied them. Scientists have started to decipher the story behind the spores and found that they are deadlier than we had thought. The way they were processed tells us volumes about the sophistication behind them and warns us that we need to expand the list of those at risk and the possibilities for what's next. An amateur working in his garage could not craft spores like these, but a microbiologist with a Ph.D. could, working out of a decent lab. Or a novice could buy the spores from a pro or someone with access to stocks in the U.S., Russia, Iraq and possibly elsewhere.

By the end of a harrowing week, as many as 20,000 Americans were on antibiotics at the government's urging. The treatment perimeter in Washington, New York and New Jersey had expanded like a forest fire. Trace amounts of the bacterium (considered insufficient to cause infection) had been detected in 11 places in Washington, including the Supreme Court's off-site mail center. But it was not until a State Department employee developed inhalation anthrax that health officials began speculating that one or more undiscovered letters had yet to be found. The single letter to Senator Tom Daschle, while surprisingly potent, could not have left so many tracks, they presumed. In one week Washington officials had come a long way from calling this anthrax "garden variety."

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The race is on for scientists to determine whether chemicals were added to the spores to make them float so freely in air currents. Simultaneously, there is a continuing frenzy to find the outer edge of the contamination, a line that officials have so far miscalculated daily--and sometimes hourly. With the two deaths from inhalation anthrax last week, the investigation has become immeasurably more urgent; with each casualty, the public's faith in government slips a little more. If order and the economy are to be preserved, not to mention support for military action, then that faith must be shored up.

Oct. 14 marked a turning point for the investigation, even if not all the investigators realized it. That day an aide to Daschle opened a letter with a return address of a fictitious New Jersey school. With that, investigators got their first look at the most potent anthrax spores in the case to date. Three days later, 31 people tested positive for exposure (that number was later reduced to 28), confirming what Army scientists studying the spores had already concluded. This is an extremely dangerous version of the bacterium. "What happened in Daschle's office was a dramatic milestone," says Dr. Alan Zelicoff, senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories for National Security and Arms Control.

With this news, the roughly 1,000 FBI agents working on the case moved to zero in on people with access to milling equipment that could grind anthrax to such a fine powder. They intensified efforts already under way to survey emergency rooms and coroners to see whether any patients had recently died from shock or severe flulike symptoms and to check with pharmaceutical and chemical companies and university labs.

Last week officials went public with a more detailed profile of the bacterium being studied at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. It is highly concentrated and pure. The material's light, fine texture and a brown ring around each spore suggest an additive had been introduced to prevent clumping. "All these things tell me that whoever is doing this has a knowledge base that's pretty damn good," says William Patrick III, who spent 20 years designing biological weapons for the U.S. before President Richard Nixon halted the program in 1969. Patrick, now a consultant in Maryland, has not examined the anthrax himself. But a Fort Detrick scientist he trusts, who is involved in the investigation, has given him a detailed description.