Word: nguyens
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...York City subway system has been tested and declared free of anthrax, according to city health officials. The tests were ordered after 61-year-old Kathy Nguyen died from inhaled anthrax. The Bronx resident?s death has stumped law enforcement officers and epidemiologists alike; investigators have been trying, without much luck, to trace the path of the deadly bacteria...
With no strong leads, investigators are turning to the public for help. In Washington, the U.S. Postal Service upped its reward for information on the attacks to $1.25 million. In New York City, the FBI and local police have put up posters asking about Manhattan hospital worker Kathy Nguyen's whereabouts in the weeks before her death. It's possible, they think, that learning how she got inhalation anthrax could somehow triangulate on the attacker...
What makes Nguyen's case so baffling is that she didn't fit any of the profiles of a potential anthrax victim. She didn't work in a post office or for the media, which have been the targets of at least three anthrax-laden letters. The stockroom where she worked adjoins the mailroom, and she did occasionally handle mail. But no suspicious letters turned up at the hospital. And tests have found no signs of anthrax either at her workplace or her apartment in the Bronx, where she lived alone. Nasal swabs of people who worked with or near...
...same time, the number of new anthrax infections has grown by only three--Nguyen's, and cases of skin anthrax that struck a New Jersey woman and a New York Post employee. Because the first two people evidently had no direct exposure to any of the known anthrax letters, nor were they known to have spent significant periods of time in the post offices that handled them, it has become increasingly hard to figure out what's going on. Maybe it's a lot easier to get the disease than the experts thought, or maybe some individuals are particularly susceptible...
...that doesn't explain how a postal worker in the State Department mail-processing center got the disease or how Nguyen contracted it. Anthrax puffed from an envelope could easily settle on mail-processing machines--where spores have been found--or on other surfaces. They could also have settled on other letters, in what's known as cross-contamination. Anyone touching a cross-contaminated letter, especially someone with an open cut, would be at risk for skin anthrax--and in fact, the New Jersey woman's mailbox tested positive late last week, suggesting that this might be what happened...