AT A WHITE HOUSE NEWS CONFERENCE yesterday afternoon, homeland security czar Tom Ridge announced that “the residents of Washington, D.C., and all Americans, can be confident that their government is taking every step possible to ensure that our mail systems are safe and that they are secure.” About the nation’s capital, in particular, Ridge promised that “we are working seamlessly with the mayor and his team.” Then Ridge reported some hard facts that called all this reassurance into question. “First, two postal employees who work at the Brentwood mail facility here in Washington, D.C., have tested positive for inhalation anthrax.” And “we also know that there are two very suspicious deaths that occurred today. . . . [and] are likely due to anthrax.” Details were sketchy Monday night, but it appeared that the first fatal case involved a 52-year-old man who entered Washington’s Greater Southeast Community Hospital at around 6 a.m. Sunday and died at 8:45 p.m. that night–not on Monday, as Ridge suggested. The second patient was a 47-year-old man, also a postal employee at Brentwood, who’d first become sick last Tuesday. A few days later, on Saturday, the man had fainted in church. Sunday morning, he’d walked into Southern Maryland Hospital, only to be sent home following an x-ray with a diagnosis of flu–and without a prescription for antibiotics. Early Monday morning the sick man was back at the hospital, where he would die six hours later, shortly before noon. After Tom Daschle’s Senate office was confirmed to have received an anthrax-laced letter, 31 people who worked or had visited there came up positive for exposure to anthrax spores in the first round of tests conducted at the Capitol. One of those positives, a visitor to Daschle’s office, was a postal employee stationed at the District’s mail screening facility on P Street, S.E. But it wasn’t until last Wednesday, two days later, that federal officials thought to inform District health authorities about that particular test result. And it wasn’t until late Thursday night–hours after a major press conference had been held there–that infectious-disease crews dressed in protective gear showed up to do environmental analysis at Washington’s main postal unit on Brentwood Road, where all P Street mail originates. On Sunday, by which time at least six D.C.-based Post Office employees were either known to be “seriously ill” with anthrax or exhibiting tell-tale symptoms, federal health officials finally began preemptive screening and prophylactic antibiotic treatment for 2,000 workers at the Brentwood facility. But it was too late for two of them, and we can only pray the others have better luck. Over the weekend, a spokesman for D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams complained to the Washington Post that federal officials–who are supposed to be “working seamlessly” with their local municipal counterparts–have been overcautious and secretive with crucial epidemiological information. “Their first instinct is not to call us,” he explained. “Their first instinct is to close in and do everything themselves. In this particular instance, it was not the right instinct.” At the White House on Monday, U.S. Postmaster General Jack Potter performed a little prophylactic therapy on anyone inclined to question his colleagues’ response to the D.C. anthrax outbreak. “This is not a situation where America should be pointing fingers at anyone else other than the terrorist,” Potter warned. Besides, Potter went on, “we have a postcard out there that’s going to every American, we have instructions on what [postal workers] should do in big mailrooms, we have a poster that’s on its way to them, [and] we have a video available to them.” No doubt it’s a weapons-grade poster and the video is of an especially pure strain. David Tell is opinion editor at The Weekly Standard.
