Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
It's not known if the letters were cross-contaminated. None had entered the building.
Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 7, 2001
WASHINGTON -- A batch of mail being processed at a mail-handling facility set up in a courtyard of the Federal Reserve's headquarters has tested positive for exposure to anthrax.
Officials said late Thursday that the positive reading was obtained for a batch of mail containing about 100 to 150 letters and it had not been determined yet whether any of the letters actually contained anthrax spores or whether some of the mail had been contaminated by other letters.
Fed spokeswoman Michelle Smith stressed that none of the mail had been inside the Fed's imposing headquarters building on Constitution Avenue or had been handled before the processing by any Fed board member.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and other members of the Fed board were briefed on the development late Thursday. A public board meeting that had been scheduled for today was canceled, but otherwise the central bank will be open for business.
Since the first anthrax letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was discovered, Fed officials said the central bank has heightened the security procedures used for handling mail.
The batch of mail that tested positive for anthrax was being processed by three Fed employees and three contract employees all wearing protective suits and breathing through respirators, Fed officials said.
The mail processing is now being done in a temporary facility set up in a courtyard of the Fed's main building on Constitution Avenue.
Smith said that the FBI had been consulted after the positive reading for anthrax was obtained with scanning devices the Fed has been using to screen all of its mail since the anthrax letters began appearing.
She said Fed employees will conduct further tests today in an effort to isolate the letter or letters that test positive for anthrax and these will be sent to a military facility for further analysis.
CINCINNATI -- A man accused of mailing of anthrax hoax letters to abortion clinics across the country was charged with a firearms violation Thursday and ordered held without bail.
Clayton Lee Waagner, 45, chatted amiably with reporters at the hearing, saying he was surprised when Attorney General John Ashcroft added him to the FBI's most-wanted list.
"Ashcroft's just doing his job," he said. "I understand he's antiabortion also. He's a good man."
Waagner was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm, which is punishable by up to life in prison. He faces charges in at least three other states and was ordered held until a grand jury meets next week.
Waagner, who escaped from an Illinois jail this year, was captured Wednesday at a suburban Cincinnati copy shop where he was using a rented computer. Authorities said he had $10,000 cash in his pocket and a loaded handgun in his waistband.
The FBI said Waagner had claimed responsibility for sending more than 550 anthrax threat letters to women's reproductive health clinics in the past two months. The clinics received envelopes containing white powder and letters signed, "Army of God." The powder was not anthrax.
Police Capt. Bill Hafer, one of the officers who arrested Waagner, said the suspect produced a fake bail bondsman's badge, then later admitted who he was.
"He said, "Hey, I guess this is it,' " Hafer said. "He said, "Don't worry about it. I don't have a problem with you. I have a problem with the abortion people.' "
WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of cases of anthrax were prevented by disease detectives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the past two months, according to a top government bioterrorism expert.
The CDC epidemiologists have seemed powerless at times, unable to track down the source of the anthrax that zipped through U.S. Postal Service letter-sorting machines and has made opening mail a fearful activity.
But while attention has focused on the failure to solve the medical mystery, no one will ever know how many lives epidemiologists saved, said Dr. Scott Lillibridge, special assistant to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.
"One thing that strikes me as the unwritten story of this man-made epidemic was the lives saved by CDC," Lillibridge said in an interview. "They prevented hundreds of illnesses, perhaps more, with good disease detective work. They stepped up the identification of people at risk and got them onto medication."
Lillibridge was himself a CDC official until a few days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Not long after his own confirmation, Thompson decided the need to strengthen HHS's ability to respond to bioterrorism was urgent. One of his first decisions was to install a special assistant to oversee the job for him.
He announced July 10 that he had plucked Lillibridge from a job as coordinator of CDC's bioterrorism work.
On Oct. 4, three days after he was originally scheduled to start the new job, he was standing beside Thompson in the White House press room, announcing that a case of inhalational anthrax had been diagnosed in Florida.