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Washington-Area Postal Facilities Close After Anthrax Alarm By Mike Nartker WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service announced today that testing is being conducted at a number of postal facilities in the Washington area for possible anthrax contamination after sensors at a U.S. Navy mail-handling facility here detected anthrax Wednesday (see GSN, Oct. 28). A preliminary test of a routine air sample obtained Wednesday at the Naval Consolidated Mail Facility resulted positive for anthrax, the Postal Service announced yesterday. The sample was taken to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. for additional tests, which also came back positive, postal spokesman Gerry McKiernan told Global Security Newswire today. The Associated Press reported today that a Navy spokesman has said the Fort Detrick tests indicated more than 130 anthrax spores present. Further tests are being conducted on the Navy mail-handling facility sample, and the results of those tests are expected later today, McKiernan said. Law enforcement official have said that the initial Fort Detrick tests were conducted by contractors, not by Army scientists, raising suspicion of a false positive result, according to the Washington Post. U.S. Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson was reported today by Reuters as saying that he believed further testing would indicate that the Navy mail-handling facility was free of anthrax. “Our preliminary analysis is, ‘Underwhelmed,’” Thompson said while attending a health ministers’ conference in Berlin. As a result of Wednesday’s preliminary test, the Postal Service closed 11 postal facilities in the Washington area that send mail to the Navy facility. Postal Service Vice President Azeezaly Jaffer said yesterday in a press statement that the facilities were closed “out of an abundance of caution.” The Postal Service announced today that the 11 closed facilities are undergoing environmental testing involving air sampling and surface testing, and those tests are expected to be completed by the end of the day. “[You] got to take these things seriously,” McKiernan said. The closed facilities include a mail-handling center on V St. in Washington that processes mail addressed to the U.S. government. The V St. facility was briefly closed early this year after initial tests detected the presence of anthrax DNA in a small batch of mail (see GSN, Jan. 16). Further testing, however, later came back negative for anthrax. McKiernan said today that there have been no reports of suspicious symptoms among postal employees and that they have received no health guidelines “at this time.” Five contract workers at the Navy mail-handling facility, however, were reported to have been offered the antibiotic ciprofloxacin.
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