The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America by Leonard A. Cole Page B

internist, initially thought she might have an infection from a spider bite. When O’Connor told him about having opened a threat letter containing powder, he considered anthrax a possibility. But he did not share his suspicion with her because “I just did not want to alarm her.” Nevertheless, he prescribed Cipro as a precaution, called the city health department, and sent a skin sample to the department’s laboratory.
    Joel Ackelsberg, who took Fried’s call at the health department, doubted that the lesion was anthrax. When he heard about a suspicious letter, he thought about the scores of hoax letters the department had seen until that time. “All these events had been hoaxes, and my approach was that they were going to continue to be hoaxes.” Dr. Ackelsberg recounted his feelings from his compact office on the second floor of the health department building on Worth Street: “The lesion was on the left side of her chest below her shoulder. It was in an unlikely location. We thought it was a spider bite that was infected. So I said, ‘Let’s just test the letter.’”
    The health department contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which managed to retrieve the suspected letter from a batch of hate mail that NBC had collected. The letter was postmarked September 25 from St. Petersburg, Florida, and said: “The unthinkable. See what happens next.” But the health department lab was unable to grow anthrax from either the biopsy or the letter, and, said Marci Layton, “We sort of moved on to other things.”
    O’Connor’s lesion later turned into a coal-black crust. (Anthrax derives its name from the Greek word for coal, anthracis .) When O’Connor heard about the anthrax case in Florida, she searched the Internet, wondering if her own lesion might be anthrax. On October 9 she visited Dr. Marc Grossman, a dermatologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, who also thought it was anthrax. Her skin sample and the letter in question were sent to the CDC for testing. Then came the call from Koplan to Marci Layton on October 12. The letter did not contain anthrax, but the biopsy did. Health department staff prepared to go to NBC to take nasal swabs and other samples. Layton explained:
    We mobilized early that morning, and by noon we were on site beginning our investigation at NBC. That included looking for [the source] since we knew the initial letter was negative. We found a second letter thanks to one of the interns that worked with [Erin O’Connor]. It was found, brought to our lab, and tested positive for anthrax.
     
    Postmarked September 18 from Trenton, New Jersey, the newly identified letter and envelope contained hand-printed capital lettering. The envelope, which contained no return address, was addressed to:
    TOM BROKAW
NBC TV
30 ROCKEFELLER PLAZA
NEW YORK NY 10112.
     
    O’Connor did not remember seeing this letter before, but she must have come in contact with it between September 19 and 25. The message on the sheet inside was a copy of the original, which evidently had been kept by the mailer. Under “09-11-01,” the letter contained five lines, including the misspelling of “penicillin”:
    THIS IS NEXT
TAKE PENACILIN NOW
DEATH TO AMERICA
DEATH TO ISRAEL
ALLAH IS GREAT
     
    In consultation with the CDC, the health department performed nasal swabs on more than 400 NBC employees. The “Nightly News” studio was closed. People who had visited the NBC offices between September 19 and 25 were urged to be tested and to begin taking an antibiotic.
    New Yorkers were in for more bad news. On Monday, October 15, the health department announced the second case of cutaneous anthrax. Then on Thursday a third case and on Friday a fourth. The second case was especially heartbreaking. At 2 p.m. on Friday, September 28, a producer at ABC’s World News Tonight had taken her 7-month-old baby for a visit to the company studio. By the time a babysitter took him home 2 hours later, several colleagues