Amerithrax (64 page)
“Chase was caught very quickly after he finally escalated to the serious crime of murder because the thought process was disturbed, disorganized. He left a lot of evidence at both crime scenes that resulted in him being eventually identified and apprehended. When you’re crazy and not thinking clearly, you leave a trail of evidence wider than the Missis- sippi and that is why disorganized thinkers or people who are mentally ill rarely become serial killers. It’s not that they don’t want to continue whatever their compulsion is but that they get stopped by the police because they are so sloppy. Oftentimes they don’t realize what they’re doing is criminal and therefore they don’t try to cover their tracks.”
Events came fast and furious now. American scientists had pledged to employ their talents in defense of the nation. First was a possible death knell for anthrax itself, the silent killer that Ernie Blanco had unwittingly carried into the AMI building.
Dr. Raymond Schuch, Dr. Daniel Nelson, and Dr. Vin- cent A. Fischetti at Rockefeller University in New York an- nounced they had come up with an anthrax killer. Their new treatment would make it impossible for anthrax to mutate
into a resistant form. The August issue of
Nature
headlined: virus deals anthrax a killer blow. The biologists had used three sets of animal experiments in which an amino acid called L-alanine was used as a germinating agent to activate dormant anthrax spores, so they could be detected instantly, then just as quickly be killed by the new enzyme, lysin. Lysin, a natural enzyme, is speedy and designed to pierce the anthrax cell wall from the inside, chew through the bacterium’s wall, and crumble it from the outside. Lysin- based methods could also detect a sample of twenty-five hundred spores in ten minutes or as few as one hundred spores after an hour’s reaction time. Not only could it detect anthrax, but it could also decontaminate infected areas. The agent, which was isolated from a virus that preys on anthrax and replicates inside the bacterium, causes “the cells literally to explode.”
The CDC and the Army’s biological defense lab at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland began running a se- ries of tests using lysin against very dangerous
Bacillus an- thracis
strains from Pakistan, China, Korea, and Turkey, as well as the Ames strain. Attack strains of anthrax could be made resistant to antibiotics, but not to lysin. The FDA al- ready has given the new method “fast track” status for ad- vanced testing to have the anthrax killer ready for large-scale stockpile supplies within three years. A virus that attacks bacteria is called a “bacteriophage” or, simply, a “phage.” These bacteria-blasting phages could take on and completely destroy a whole colony of much larger bacteria. These tiny microbes (about one-fortieth the size of most bacteria cells) had once been a cure for bacterial infections but had been replaced by antibiotics, which had a broader spectrum. Now their turn had come again.
Lysin could be used like an antidote to treat people who may have been exposed to spores in an anthrax attack. If injected quickly enough, the lysin would destroy the anthrax bacteria in the bloodstream before they had multiplied and released overwhelming amounts of toxin. The government began repeating the Rockefeller experiments using the Ames strain of anthrax bacteria at the Institute. The Institute and the NIH were in the process of planning a biomedical re-
Within six months, a small biotechnology company in Rockville, Maryland, Human Genome Sciences Inc., would announce it had created an antidote to anthrax. It would protect animals against extremely high doses of weaponized anthrax. After human testing the drug was set to enter the nation’s bioterrorism arsenal in 2004. Anthony Fauci, direc- tor of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Dis- eases, called the data “impressive” and said the drug could become an important defense tool.
New documents obtained by court order suggested postal officials knew Brentwood had been contaminated after proc- essing anthrax-contaminated letters sent to Capitol Hill, yet postal officials kept the building open for three more days. A spokesman for the conservative consumer watchdog group Judicial Watch said, “They’re smoking gun docu- ments that prove that postal officials knew that their work- ers’ lives were at risk, yet they did nothing.” But the building wasn’t evacuated and postal workers were not put on antibiotics until October 21, 2001. By contrast, when the letter to Daschle was opened in the Hart Office Building, the offices were shut down immediately and staffers given medicine. Judicial Watch called for a criminal investigation, claiming the Postal Service kept Brentwood open to avoid losing half a million dollars a day.
Postal worker Leroy Richmond, a slender, older, pleasant man in a sweater, told television cameras, “It’s unbelievable that an organization would put profits above human life.” In defense the Postal Service said it was relying on advice from health officials who believed that there was no way enough spores could leak out of a sealed envelope to infect anyone. “Our decision,” said Tom Day, “never, absolutely never, included a dollar-and-cents equation.” Because of the an- thrax letters, mail revenue for passenger airlines in the sec- ond quarter of 2002 was $147 million, down from $236 million for the second quarter of 2001. The Postal Service was commercial aviation’s single largest customer.
“My immediate instinct was to close the Boca Raton post office,” an expert told the press. “If we had closed the post office in Florida, it would have set a precedent to close Brentwood.” Workers at Brentwood complained that not enough was done to protect them while drastic measures were taken to close offices and provide antibiotics to work- ers in Congress. “The risk to Brentwood facility employees by contaminated envelopes in transit was not recognized in time to prevent illness in four employees, two of whom died,” Dr. Perkins, the CDC’s anthrax expert, wrote in the CDC journal
Emerging Infectious Diseases.
CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding, a leading light in the anthrax response, said the picture was not as crystal clear at the time. “There were lots of people participating in those details,” she said. “You don’t close the post office without a good reason.” Dr. Jim Hughes, head of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at CDC and a key participant in the decision, agreed. “There were a lot of things we thought we knew when the attack began,” he said. The agency stressed that no one had ever dealt with such an attack before. Infec- tious disease experts were learning as they went. The deci- sion not to close the Boca Raton post offices initially seemed vindicated because there was no cross-contamination of mail from that facility. And when anthrax cases turned up in New York, they were, as predicted, all cutaneous anthrax infec- tions.
When the CDC suspected that the envelopes could leak an aerosol, there had been a reluctance by law enforcement agencies to make information public. They had gagged the CDC. The CDC and HHS said now they would act very differently if another attack occurred. “It turns out it was not such a big deal to close a post office,” said one official. “I think we all wish we’d closed the Brentwood facility,”
Gerberding said. “The lessons to be learned from this are not to blame or to second-guess, but to keep all possibilities open.” The CDC had learned the importance of communi- cation. Though Brentwood remained closed, other facilities took up the slack and Washington was sending and receiving mail normally. The delivery of anthrax to the offices of Sen- ators Daschle and Leahy in a weaponized aerosol had dem- onstrated how effortlessly key government buildings could be immobilized. At least now the Postal Service knew that anthrax letters could produce cross-contamination in the processing of mail in sorting centers. The CDC
Journal
has said the danger remains of another attack, as whoever sent the letters has not been found.
But Amerithrax in the end had made the mail safer. There were new machines on order or on the drawing board to detect and safeguard postal workers serving at risk for all Americans. There were irradiation machines, electron-beam purification systems, continuous dust vacu- uming and air filtration with HEPA filters, and DNA-based detectors. In thirty minutes one prototype machine could identify virulent strains of anthrax by their DNA (but not yet able to continuously monitor the air). There were mass spectrometry machines that isolated submicroscopic sam- ples and could nail anthrax’s molecular profile (but they were not yet adapted for that purpose). There were “dog’s nose” synthetic compounds that glowed instantly when they “smelled” distinctive particles in the air. So far, they had been used only to detect traces of TNT, but within five years could be adapted to trace anthrax. Biodetectors to de- tect airborne spores were inefficient or registered false pos- itives, a problem now being addressed at Lawrence Livermore in California.
Over the past eleven months more than a billion dollars had been delivered to states to help rebuild public health services that were suffering after years of neglect. The in- vestment has already borne fruit in states coping with West Nile Virus, a deadly mosquito-borne disease. West Nile had served as a useful test of systems set up to combat biological attack. The Postal Service was testing germ detectors at Bal- timore’s main postal facility on Fayette Street. Bio-detection
But there was still great danger.
The U.S. suspected Saddam of concealing caches of bioweapons in hundreds of Iraqi desert sites. Ten thousand liters of anthrax and chemical agents were still unac- counted for by Iraq. Saddam had outfitted unmanned vehi- cles (UAVs) with spray tanks for anthrax. Kenneth Pollack, former director of Persian Gulf affairs at the NSC, wrote that “Saddam has taken the entire Iraqi pro- gram on the road.” For the future, Saddam was apparently counting on a shadow fleet of mobile germ labs crisscross- ing Iraq to dupe UN weapons inspectors. His “Winneba- gos of death” looked like eighteen-wheel tractor trailer trucks or mobile homes and even ice cream trucks. Rail cars and trailers would be conveying germ agents like an- thrax. The UN inspectors, though, had a new tool— ground-penetrating radar, a device dragged across the ground to detect irregularities in the earth such as hidden underground biological facilities.
Early in September 2002, the government suggested that those cleaning and searching anthrax-contaminated build- ings should receive a vaccine, not just antibiotics, to protect them. This guideline had been issued specifically for anthrax cleanup crews such as the teams combing AMI. The existing rules for work in hazardous sites didn’t go far enough to protect the workers. “Protective suits and antibiotics are not enough,” they said. “The suits can fail and it may not be healthy to use antibiotics for the long periods of time work- ers can spend in a cleanup zone.” So far, no cleanup workers at any of the sites of anthrax attacks had contracted the disease. Also in September, there was a minor outbreak of anthrax in South Dakota, the third that year, and it made
“In a worst-case scenario, a nuclear or chemical attack in San Francisco, San Diego or Los Angeles would kill as many as eighty thousand people,” the RAND study said. Two hundred twenty pounds of anthrax, “if properly dis- persed under optimum conditions” would saturate 180 square miles. Deaths could be in the millions. The study said California was better prepared than most states because it was used to combating natural disasters such as forest fires, mudslides, and earthquakes. A Stanford Business School report would say that the nation was still not pre- pared for an anthrax attack. Large amounts of antibiotics to fight anthrax were still not available. If two pounds of an- thrax were dropped over New York City, estimated the re- port, 123,000 people would die.
FBI agents, their eyes fairly gleaming, alleged that their slow but steady investigation of an individual in the anthrax investigation was bearing fruit. They had sent investigators to South Africa where Hatfill had worked and attempted to learn whether he had taken part in the alleged anthrax poi- sonings there. They delved into his time in the Selous Scouts, who had been suspected of delivering anthrax to natives and their cattle. “We have a growing case of circum- stantial evidence against Steven Hatfill,” they said. The FBI announced it was pursuing more than a thousand leads, in- cluding one hundred overseas.
Within a few days FBI agents would root through Dr. Hatfill’s Frederick apartment once more. “Why do they have to search a third time?” Pat Clawson would complain. “Isn’t the FBI competent enough to do the job the first two times?” Within three months a tip from an informant would lead Codename Amerithrax agents to a wooded area in the Ca- toctin Mountains. The tipster would hint that lab equipment