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American Morning

Anthrax Investigation: Delay in Treating Postal Workers at Brentwood Facility

Aired October 23, 2001 - 09:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: The latest now on the anthrax attacks, 32 exposures, 10 infections, one death, two other suspected anthrax deaths. CNN's Rea Blakey is at D.C. General Hospital in Washington where postal workers are being tested for anthrax exposure. Many of those folks are from Washington's Brentwood mail facility, where Sheila Kast is covering the story, and there was a delay in treating postal workers in Brentwood, and that's one of the issues covered by our own medical correspondent Dr. Dr. Sanjay Gupta at CNN Center.

Welcome all.

Let's start with Rea first at D.C. general.

Good morning again, Rea.

REA BLAKEY, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula.

At this time, we estimate there is approximately 100, maybe 125 postal workers in this line, queuing up to make sure that they can get treated with antibiotics and tested. They are doing the nasal swabs again. All told, there will be about 4,200 D.C. areas postal workers who are tested and treated if all goes well for the possible exposure to anthrax.

Yesterday, many of these people left the building with their Cipro supplies, a-10 day supply, and they were also given instruction that if they heard from someone within three to five days, it is likely they would have tested positive. However, if they did not hear from any of the public health officials, chances are they were just fine, they should continue their treatment.

It was an interesting occurrence as the day went on, because we noticed that more and more of the employees sort of changed their attitude from sort of a carefree, casual, just precaution attitude to some expressions of sheer disappointment with the way the situation was handled.

Take note of what this postal worker, Melvin Thweatt, had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MELVIN THEATT, POSTAL EMPLOYEE: They closed the Capitol down first. That was kind of disappointing, you know. BLAKEY: Why?

THWEATT: Well, our lives are important, too. You know, we -- you would think we would have closed this down at the same time, at least, but they didn't. I know the mail got to go out, but the post office preaches safety first -- safety.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLAKEY: Now, postmaster general, Deputy Postmaster General John Nolan, indicated why there was such a delay, basically that they were going on the information they were provided from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and at that point, there was no indication of a sincere threat at that time.

Here is Mr. Nolan.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN NOLAN, DEP. POSTMASTER GENERAL: There was no information at all that indicated there was any risk. You had -- the postmaster general himself was in that facility with a number of other people, and is now taking precautionary measures, so it is not that we were happy to have someone else take risk while we sat somewhere else, but that is not the point; the point is that we did not believe that there was a risk.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLAKEY: Now, it is very likely that by time all these people are tested and treated, some 10,000 people in the Washington, D.C. area could be on the antibiotic Cipro. That is not a concern at this point. However, public health officials want to make sure to contain the number of people; they don't want large numbers of people on antibiotics, just in case of some possibly of resistance developing at a later state.

More on this story now from my colleague Sheilah Kast, who is at the Brentwood mail facility.

SHEILAH KAST, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Thank you, Rea.

Here at Brentwood, the major activity today is going to be continuing to test the facility, the physical facility, for traces of anthrax, to figure out what would be involved in cleaning it up again. A private contractor is working with people from the Centers for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency to continue the testing. There was already testing here at 29 spots within the facility and showed anthrax was found in 14 of those spots. So that is the major activity here.

As Rea pointed out, the workers here, who usually work here. There are about 2,100 workers on a normal day, processing 3.5 million pieces of mail. Many of them are still lining up to be tested. Others have been redirected, along with mail itself, which has all been moved to processing facilities in suburban Maryland. So some of those working are working at other facilities.

The Postal Service is trying to work on several fronts to assure the public mail can be safe. Postmaster General Jack Potter has said the Postal Service will invest in equipment and technology to sanitize the mail, and he mentioned in particular the kind of irradiation techniques that are used to irradiate and kill germs on fruit, and meat and other kinds, and the food. The Postal Service also has a big public relations job to do, both in trying to keep the public from becoming frightened of the mail, and of assuring its workers that they have not been ignored -- Paula.

ZAHN: All right, Sheila, thanks so much.

The Postal Service says it was simply following the lead of the Centers for Disease Control when it delayed the search for anthrax in that Brentwood mail facility.

Our medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta is at CNN Center this morning. Dr. Gupta, everybody is asking the question, why the delay? I mean, it didn't take them that long to figure out that the letter traveled from Trentwood to Brentwood to a third mail facility. Is there any excuse for that?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I don't know that there is an excuse for that, Paula, certainly not when people's lives are at stake; there's probably never a very good excuse. But hearing from Tom Ridge and folks, the way that they sort of tried to approach this was to work backwards from where they knew anthrax was, trace it back to the post room right there on site, the Capitol building, and then offsite congressional building, and then didn't find anything at offsite congressional mail office, according to the environmental samples at that point.

They didn't find the need apparently to go backwards one more step to the Brentwood facility. We have been hearing so much about. I think it is really clearly a case of working with the information that you have. If they had found anthrax, at the congressional office offsite facility may have taken it one step further found there it, I don't know. It is certainly hard to look backwards. But it is hard to say whether or not they should have looked that facility earlier or not.

ZAHN: And to try to make it clear here, I had the deputy postmaster general on the air earlier in the day, and he said, look, had we thought it was dangerous, we certainly wouldn't have had postmaster general going into that facility, which brings to mind something Richard Butler said earlier this morning on the air, a former U.N. weapons inspector, and he said he thinks it's simply that the assumption about the quality of the anthrax used was wrong, that it was purer maybe than they originally thought.

GUPTA: Right. And I remember Mr. Butler saying that as well right after the Daschle letter was opened, and we have yet to hear back exactly what they are determining to be weapons grade or weaponized. We are hearing a lot of terms thrown around, and yet to hear somebody say conclusively that this was absolutely 100 percent weaponized, which is really a term of art more than it is a term of absolute definition, but I guess we are waiting on that as well.

But, Paula, you know, one thing as in conjunction with that, is we are seeing a lot of changes in the way that the protocol has been in handling this anthrax, things like hearing Rea talk about fact that she got 10 days, or the folks over there got 10 days of antibiotics, which is different than three days, which some of the folks at the Capitol building received that weren't in the area, which is different than 15 days, which the folks in Florida got, and we are told they had option of continuing a full treatment.

What we are seeing is a disparity in a little bit in how this is handled, and I think that is a reflection of the fact that a lot of doctors who are taking care of this, a lot of health officials, just have not seen this before, and they are trying to do best that they can with information that they have.

ZAHN: Well, let me throw in another variable here. Governor Pataki was on the air, sat next to me yesterday, saying he took Cipro for five days. At the same time, government officials are telling people to be tested first before they take this stuff. The governor wasn't even tested, and his medical authorities in the state told him he should take Cipro prophylactically.

GUPTA: Yes, Paula, and that was very interesting, and I remember that he wasn't tested, and I did ask a lot of questions of CDC officials and some of the health officials about that, and let me try be to be as concise as I can in the answer, because it is not a very easy one, but basically, the tests that we're talking about, the nasal swabs, and all that, the blood tests, are not really good individual tests. They are more tests to sort of look at populations of people.

That may not be exactly information people want to hear, but the way they determine exposure is really to look not only at the laboratory tests, but also to look at the likelihood of exposure. How close were to you anthrax? Was there a fan in the room? Was there a door that opened? Did a window open? All sorts of different things, in conjunction with the clinical tests. So the clinical tests as a stand alone may not be enough, meaning that if it came back negative, it wouldn't mean that you shouldn't still be treated prophylactically with antibiotics. So, there is a lot of variable pieces, as you say, to this puzzle.

ZAHN: We are going to rely on your expertise, because you certainly cleared up the confusion this morning.

Doctor, thank you.

The anthrax scares, they are forcing the evacuation of offices, schools, even subways. Well yesterday. New York City subways were shut down, something the city's transit department says is -- quote -- "the new normal." One police officer told stranded subway commuters -- quote -- "You should know what's going on in this town. Where have you been?"

Well, subway safety is a concern in every major city, and CNN's Jason Carroll is standing outside a subway station here in New York. Hi, Jason.

JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Paula.

I can tell you that those four incidents yesterday were all hoaxes. We had two suspicious packages and two situations where people spotted a powdery substance. Once again, all of those situations there were hoaxes.

The point is, there were security measures in place so that officials could react quickly, and in fact the metropolitan transportation authority tells us that they are right now on a heightened state of alert, and now we asked them to provide more details in terms of exactly what that means. But they said that for security reasons, they are unable to do that, but we can tell you that we have seen National Guard troops patrolling Penn Station and Grand Central. Those are two major stations here in New York City. In addition to that, there were undercover officers patrolling the subways as well, looking for suspicious activity.

But is it enough? We posed that question to commuters this morning as we have been out here in New York City. Two of them are joining me right now.

I've got Brian here, and Wahid.

First all, Brian, I'm going to go to you.

I was asking you earlier this morning, do you think at all about safety when hop on the subway, or are just thinking what you have to do when you get to work?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Normally, just what do I have to do to get to work. But if there is a subway stop, the other day they stopped for a medium (ph) minute, but it seemed like five minutes. At that point, we were worried. You know, who should we call? Find out what's going on. Because in a normal situation that's fine. In times like this, I don't know if something is going on.

CARROLL: Do you think enough is being done in terms of security in the subway?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What else do you want us to do? We are trying to move on with life. There is a saying that the robber (ph) who smiles steals something from the thief. We have got to move on. You know, the Angels are still going to play behind us here, and we've got to go to games, if we're Rangers fans. We've got to cheer on the Yankees if we're Yankees fans.

CARROLL: I was just about to mention the Yankees.

Wahid, let's move on to you right here. Now you are originally from Egypt, how does our security measures here compare to what they do over there?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, first of all, I love the democracy of this country, and I can't see any better security measures to be made in a democratic country that what is made in the present. I don't think that we should sacrifice freedom and democracy for the sake of some terrorists. We need to have courage, we need to have faith, we need to turn to God instead of turning to fear. Actually, fear will stop us from investing. It will stop us from going -- it will stop tourism completely. It is will stop us going from work stop. It will stop us sleeping at night as we'll. We don't need to give up our courage for a bunch of terrorists.

CARROLL: Wahid and Brian, thank you very much. Both of you have a terrific day at work.

Also in terms of security measures that are in place right now, I can tell you that the Transportation Authority tells us that before this whole incident happened when you had a package down in the subway, it would simply be reported to a lost and found, but now that we have these new security measures in place, what they do is they treat it as a suspicious package and treat it accordingly, Paula.

ZAHN: Jason, I realize how you really are smack dab in the busiest part of city people. You can see the people, they are like almost running behind you this morning. You must have made them late for work, Jason.

Thanks for that.

CARROLL: Sorry about that. Had to get the story on, you know how it is.

ZAHN: I know, you are always a hundred percent committed to that. Thank you.

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