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Anthrax: Washington Postal Facility Given All-Clear After Testing By Mike Nartker The Postal Service decided to test the V Street facility, which processes mail addressed to U.S. agencies, after a laboratory culture test indicated the presence of anthrax in a sample taken from Federal Reserve Board mail processing site, according to postal officials. More than 85 samples were taken from the postal facility Tuesday night, including both surface and air samples, said Thomas Day, Postal Service vice president of engineering. Samples were collected at locations throughout the facility where it was likely that mail addressed to the Reserve would be handled, he said, adding that the autumn 2001 anthrax attacks provided officials with information on which equipment should be tested. Tested equipment included an optical character reader and a bar code sorter, as well as letter cases and mail sack racks. Postal officials also reviewed health records of the facility’s employees for the past two weeks to determine if there were unusual instances of sick leave that might have indicated an anthrax infection, Postal Service spokesman Gerald McKiernan said, adding that none was found. Yesterday’s tests were conducted at a laboratory set up outside the Brentwood Road postal facility in Washington, where postal officials have been conducting a massive anthrax decontamination effort, Day said (see GSN, Dec. 18, 2002). He praised the laboratory’s effectiveness, saying that it has tested over 15,000 samples taken during the Brentwood decontamination process and has experience working with live anthrax samples. There is essentially a “mathematical certainty,” that the V Street facility is not contaminated by anthrax, Day said. The Reserve first learned of the potential anthrax contamination when routine testing on Jan. 3 detected the presence of anthrax DNA in a small batch of about 15 mail pieces, spokesman David Skidmore said today. The tests, however, were unable to determine if the anthrax DNA was part of a live spore, he said. Technicians obtained 36 samples from the batch of mail and sent them to a private laboratory in North Carolina. Out of those 36 samples, one, taken from a package addressed to Reserve Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson, produced “a suspect colony” that was presumed to be anthrax, Skidmore said. He noted that the package addressed to Ferguson did not appear suspicious. A state-run North Carolina laboratory, working under U.S. Centers for Disease Control guidelines, conducted further tests on the presumed anthrax culture yesterday and learned that it was not anthrax, Skidmore said. The sample has now been sent to the CDC for identification, he said. The CDC should release the results of its testing in coming days, Day said. For further information, see: CDC Frequently Asked Questions About Anthrax Journal of the American Medical Association Background on Anthrax GSN Anthrax Attack Chronology (Dec. 12, 2001)
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