CULVER CITY, Calif., Oct. 13 (UPI) -- A West Coast Sony Pictures employee was recovering Saturday after opening an envelope containing a powdery white substance, the latest in an increasing string of people either exposed to the deadly anthrax disease agent or suspected to have been exposed to it.
The man, whose name was not released, was taken to Brotman Medical Center Friday night after he opened an envelope at Sony Picture's studios in Culver City, Calif.
The NBC "Nightly News" assistant to anchor Tom Brokaw, confirmed Friday to have contracted anthrax as a skin infection, was identified by The New York Times Saturday as 38-year-old Erin O'Connor. She is expected to recover because her doctors began to administer antibiotics on Oct. 1, well before anthrax was positively identified Friday as the cause of a skin lesion on her chest.
Culver City police Lt. Dave Tankenson told CNN, "When he opened it, he took out an item and got a white powdery substance on his hands."
Tankenson said officials were discussing the possibility the powder contained anthrax spores, but could not be sure until test results were completed.
Meanwhile, authorities in New York awaited the results of tests being performed on a powdery substance found in the letter mailed to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
Several floors of the New York Times' offices and the third floor of the NBC offices in Rockefeller Plaza were sealed off to allow health department inspections but so far no further trace of the anthrax spores have been reported.
The results of the tests on the powder inside the business-sized New York Times letter were expected to be released later Saturday.
A 63-year-old photo editor of the Sun supermarket tabloid newspaper in Lantana, Fla. became the first American in a quarter century to die of an anthrax lung infection, considered more hazardous than the skin infection that turned up at NBC.
Evidence of anthrax was detected in three of his coworkers, one of them a mailroom courier and all of whom are believed to have begun treatment in time to avoid complications. Several hundred of their coworkers are also being administered precautionary antibiotic doses which will have to continue for about two months.
The Times Saturday reported that New York City officials, including Mayor Rudy Giuliani, were furious that the FBI had not informed them of the NBC complaint of a suspicious envelope when it was first made, Sept. 25, or had passed on that the initial test of the NBC envelope's powdery substance was negative for anthrax.
The letters to the Times and to NBC were both postmarked St. Petersburg, Fla., officials said.
Vice President Dick Cheney Friday night warned that "the only responsible thing for us to do is proceed on the basis that they could be linked," referring to a possible connection between the anthrax episodes and the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
That was a departure from the assurances so far from New York City officials, the FBI and Florida health officials that so far there is no evidence of a link.
"It's a time when the U.S. homeland now is open to attack in ways that we've only speculated about before," Cheney told Jim Lehrer in an extended interview on the PBS "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" program.
Cheney said that "there's no reason for us to operate on the assumption" that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon "was a one-off event that's never going to happen again. In fact," he continued, "we have to assume it will happen again and that's the only safe way for us to proceed."
