WASHINGTON, March 15 (UPI) -- Stock prices fell Tuesday on news of a suspected anthrax attack and questions piled up about the handling of two anthrax alerts, one at the Pentagon and the second at an office complex in Fairfax, Va.
Local officials scrambled Monday to deal with the incidents, the first at a detached mail processing facility on the Pentagon grounds and the second at a Skyline office complex in Fairfax.
The two incidents likely are connected, said Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Commander Jane Campbell. The Pentagon facility processes mail that is sent to the Skyline satellite offices, she told United Press International.
As more information about the Pentagon alert emerged Tuesday, questions also surfaced about delays in getting test results from the facilities.
Pentagon officials told UPI swabs used to take daily samples at that site are sent to a laboratory in Richmond, Va., for analysis. Results of the last Thursday's swabs were positive but results from Friday's tests were negative.
Pentagon officials did not receive Thursday's results until Monday, however, at which point local and state officials were notified. They told UPI they were checking why there was such a long delay but noted it might have had something to do with the weekend.
Both the delay and the Richmond testing are puzzling. The federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing detectors to shave only a day off the time between when a bioterror attack takes place and when it is detected.
The reasoning has been that 24 hours can make the difference in successfully treating those affected. In the case of inhalational anthrax, which is highly lethal if not treated before the onset of major symptoms, a delay of four days is serious. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said symptoms, including severe breathing problems and shock, can emerge within several days of initial flu-like symptoms.
Given the Pentagon's status as a prime terrorist target, one might envision a closer testing lab than Richmond.
Also to be considered is the complexity that delays create for any subsequent investigation. For example, about 8,000 pieces of mail went through system between Thursday and Monday. That mail now is being recollected for examination.
Flaws in the current system, however, appear so far to be more of an opportunity to fix things rather than a fatal error. The swabs are a backup test and showed only a trace amount of anthrax. A scanner that checks all incoming mail and shipments for chemical and biological hazards did not signal an alert. It also is relevant that all incoming shipments of mail are irradiated to kill anthrax spores.
The Pentagon announced Tuesday night that some additional 70 tests performed in the previous 24 hours, in and around the Pentagon, all were negative for anthrax.
There is less known, at this point, about the incident in Fairfax. The Skyline offices are leased by the Department of Defense and detectors there were alerted Monday to the presence of anthrax in one building's mail rooms. Hundreds of people in the three-building complex were confined to their offices, along with people in a nearby but unconnected building.
There have been no confirmatory tests received on material that triggered the Skyline alert, said Dan Schmidt, a Fairfax County fire and rescue spokesman.
"We still don't know what it is," Schmidt told UPI, but noted the detector in question was designed to test for anthrax.
More than 40 people who worked in the Skyline mail room were given the option of taking antibiotics as a precautionary measure. Regional hospitals also were notified to watch for patients presenting with any anthrax symptoms. At least one person was transported to the hospital with flu-like symptoms, Schmidt said, but it was done as a precaution and that individual may, indeed, only have the flu.
Questions over what pathogen actually caused the alert might explain the way officials dealt with the possible contamination Monday.
The Skyline complex is so large it has three street addresses, but while it remained closed Tuesday the building next door was open, despite having been locked-down on Monday. People were confined to that neighboring building until about 5:30 p.m. Monday without being given specific information about what had happened, said Mark Milett, who works in the building.
"We weren't told anything. We were just told what the problem was but we weren't told why we were being held," Milett told UPI.
He said his location is completely separate from the mail facility location and it does not share an air conditioning system. People originally were told they could not drive out of the building and then were not allowed to leave altogether.
Schmidt said the incident commander made the call to close the fourth building, although he could not say specifically why. One possibility is the building was close enough to be cross-contaminated or perhaps shared bulk mail delivery. Another possibility is a fear of contagion -- that is on-the-scene officials were not sure what had caused the alert and were worried additional people might be infected. This seems unlikely, though, as other nearby locations, including a gym and a discount store, were not closed.
Meanwhile, a post office at 3070 V St. in northeast Washington, which would have handled the Pentagon's mail, was closed and its 250 employees offered antibiotics. The move was precautionary, UPI was told, as it was not yet clear if an item carrying the anthrax might have come through the facility.
The anthrax news helped send stock prices down at Tuesday's close, several market monitors reported. The Dow closed down 59.41 at 10,745.10 and the Nasdaq ended the day at 2,034.98, down 16.
The 2001 anthrax attacks crippled business, experts told UPI, and recovery remains slow in some arenas.
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UPI's Pam Hess contributed to this report.
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