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U.S. Postal Workers Believe They Were Treated Unfairly in Wake of 2001 Anthrax Attacks
Public health officials provided “very little useful information” to U.S. postal workers and Senate staffers who might have been exposed to anthrax during the 2001 attacks, according to a RAND Corp. study released yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 9, 2004). Some workers at the Brentwood mail facility in Washington said they believed officials considered them more as case studies than people in need of treatment, according to the Associated Press. “I made it plain that I thought it was a cover-up,” said one employee. “Because the government’s done it before. They did it with syphilis,” the employee added, referring to the Tuskegee experiments of the 1930s, in which government researchers withheld treatment from black study participants. Nearly all of the 36 postal workers who participated in the RAND study identified themselves as African-American. Five of the seven Senate staffers were white; they reported receiving good information from doctors at the U.S. Capitol, AP reported. Two Brentwood employees died of anthrax in 2001 after the facility processed contaminated mail sent to former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. Senate staffers were treated the day the letter was opened. The Brentwood employees were not treated until six days later, the RAND report found. U.S. Postal Service spokesman Gerry McKiernan said the agency was not aware of anthrax exposure at the facility until the day workers were treated. “It’s unfortunate and regrettable that some employees might still hold those views,” McKiernan said. “At the time of the occurrence, very little was known about anthrax. And we were acting based on advice given to us by public health officials.” “There was no preference shown” in treating some 10,000 people exposed to anthrax during the attacks, according to a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The RAND focus groups were small and comprised of volunteers — not selected at random — meaning that individuals “more likely to have strong opinions about the events may have been more likely to participate,” according to the authors (Lara Jakes Jordan, Associated Press/San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 22).
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