WASHINGTON, March 16 (UPI) -- Buildings are reopening and officials at the Pentagon and in nearby Fairfax County, Va., with a stack of negative test results in their hands, are sending bioterrorism task forces home after responding to three positive anthrax test results this week.
On Wednesday, there appeared to be no remaining threat -- and it was not even clear if there ever was a threat. Despite the reduction in anxiety, however, there simply is not enough information yet to really say what happened. That's a problem. There needs to be more questions and more answers.
What has been confirmed is that swabs were taken of surfaces at a detached mail facility on the Pentagon grounds last Thursday. Those swabs were sent, as were swabs taken the next day, to a facility in Richmond for testing. The whole process is a routine precautionary procedure.
The Richmond facility reported the samples taken Thursday were positive for anthrax and test results on the Friday samples were negative.
Those test results were not reported back to the Pentagon until Monday, however, and no explanation has yet been offered for the delay. A Pentagon official told United Press International it may have had something to do with the intervening weekend and was being investigated.
The original samples from Thursday on Monday were sent to the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., which confirmed the presence of anthrax -- marking a second positive test.
Also on Monday, once the first tests results were received, the Pentagon shut down the mail facility, tested employees for exposure, and gave them health advice with the option of taking a three-day regime of antibiotics.
A few hours later on Monday, a separate alarm sounded at a mail facility in a complex of three buildings in Fairfax County. The buildings at 5109, 5111 and 5113 Leesburg Pike -- also known as Skyline 4, 5 and 6 -- are interconnected. Officials responding to the alert shut down all the buildings, holding everyone inside until well into the evening. They also shut down at least one nearby building -- not connected to the other three -- at 5107 Leesburg Pike.
An interview with a Pentagon official Monday night supports subsequent news reports that Fairfax County initially was unaware of what had happened that day at the Pentagon.
Fairfax County officials were again surprised Tuesday night when Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant defense secretary for health affairs, told reporters some 70 negative tests had cleared both the Pentagon and the Skyline facilities -- an assertion repeated to UPI by a DOD spokesman.
A Fairfax County official Wednesday morning, however, disagreed that the Skyline facilities were cleared of the anthrax threat.
"The Skyline protocol is continuing and there are still tests pending at Skyline," said Merni Fitzgerald, spokeswoman for both Fairfax County and the National Capitol Region Joint Information Center.
The clear lack of communication, especially after the fuss made in recent years over intergovernmental coordination, highlights an area that clearly needs work.
Far more important, however, is getting to the bottom of the alerts themselves. It still is possible the alarms were caused by mail cross-contaminated with anthrax.
The two alerts at the Pentagon and at Skyline are separate -- connected perhaps, but apparently distinct. That difference is important because of a theory suggested to reporters by an unnamed federal official to explain the Pentagon alarm.
The official said the actual cause of the alert at the Pentagon might be contamination of the sample at the Richmond lab. The contamination would have been from anthrax kept at the lab to verify testing.
The alert that happened at Skyline, however, based on conversations with officials and news reports, does not appear to be based on samples that went through the Richmond lab. Instead, it was triggered Monday by an automated sensing system on location.
If this is indeed accurate -- and officials have not responded to repeated questions on the matter -- then contamination in Richmond does not appear to be the likely cause of the Skyline alert. What then, triggered the alarm that got hundreds of people locked in their offices for hours?
A clue might be found in the mail flow. There are at least two places where the mail could have become cross-contaminated.
A Pentagon spokesman told UPI Monday night that mail from the facility on the Pentagon grounds was sent to the Skyline facility. Mail from the Pentagon would be sent to Skyline as those buildings are leased by the Department of Defense and military personnel work there.
A Washington official also told UPI that Defense Department mail was processed at a facility on V Street in Northeast Washington. Mail for both the Pentagon and Skyline could have passed through that same location. That post office was closed temporarily this week specifically because it handled Defense Department mail. Workers there also were given the option of taking antibiotics.
There does not appear to be any health risk from the mail, which was irradiated before it reached either the Pentagon or Skyline buildings. Irradiation removes the health risk but not the anthrax. The sensors at Skyline and at the Pentagon would have altered on irradiated anthrax mail, officials said.
People shouldn't get too comfortable, however. Two separate alarms at Defense Department facilities on the same mail route in a matter of days seem like a pretty big coincidence. The questions should not be allowed to drop from the public view.
--
E-mail questions or comments to [email protected]
