Word: postally
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Last month’s anthrax bioterrorism attacks were traced to envelopes full of white powder sent through the postal service...
AMANDA BOWER has been reporting on the investigation into the hijackings and the anthrax attacks. She recently retraced the letter route of one of the Trenton postal workers infected with cutaneous anthrax. Talk to her on Tuesday...
...realization that they know little about anthrax in general and about this attack in particular. Anthrax spores have been detected at a widening list of sites. In the past week they showed up for the first time at a mailroom in the Washington, D.C., V.A. Medical Center; a postal facility in Kansas City, Mo.; a shop in Indianapolis, Ind., that repairs postal machines; a third New Jersey post office and a sixth in Florida; in four mailrooms at the Food and Drug Administration in Rockville, Md.; at a newspaper in Pakistan; and at the U.S. embassies in Peru and Lithuania...
...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...
...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...