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CNN Live At Daybreak

Kathy Nguyen's Neighbors Say They're Stunned and Scared; Discussion with NIH Director Anthony Fauci

Aired November 01, 2001 - 07:00   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: A mysterious death in New York. Officials are calling it a homicide. How did this woman contract anthrax?

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Fighting the contamination -- in a CNN exclusive, the chief executive officer of Bayer talks about the supply of the drug Cipro.

ZAHN: And security in the sky -- a sharply divided Congress prepares to battle it out over how to make flying safer.

And good morning. Thanks so much for joining us this morning. It is Thursday, November 1. Welcome to a brand new month here. From New York, I'm Paula Zahn.

O'BRIEN: Good morning to you. I'm Miles O'Brien.

ZAHN: We have correspondents at work overseas covering the war on terrorism plus here in the States on the anthrax scare. Jason Carroll is at the hospital where a Bronx woman died early yesterday. Dr. Sanjay Gupta is at CNN Center with how the woman might have been infected and Susan Candiotti is in Washington with the latest on the investigation. We'll talk to you all in just a few minutes.

O'BRIEN: And we have several guests helping us out this morning. We'll speak with Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health on the search for the source of the anthrax that killed Kathy Nguyen. And next hour, one of the victims' neighbors joins us. And then in the nine o'clock hour, the chief health official for Washington will answer your e-mail questions live right here.

ZAHN: First, though, the latest headlines.

And for that let's check in with Bill Hemmer, who is in Atlanta on war alert.

BILL HEMMER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Paula, good morning.

And on this Thursday, top level Mideast talks under way today in Jerusalem. The British Prime Minister Tony Blair, America's staunch ally in the war on terrorism, meeting now the Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Public statements expected shortly. We'll go there live when they do take place in the Middle East. In the meantime, in this country, federal investigators scrambling now to try and solve the mystery on how Kathy Nguyen contracted inhalation anthrax. She was a 61-year-old working in a New York hospital. She died yesterday morning. She worked in the stock room of a Manhattan hospital. Her death, considered a homicide, is the first anthrax death with no apparent link to either the government, the news media or the postal service.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID SATCHER, SURGEON GENERAL: There's no link, and that's what really has us concerned. We need to find out how she was infected. A lot of investigations are going on as we speak. The epidemiologists from the CDC and working with the local health departments are looking very intensely into this case. We need to find out exactly where and how she was exposed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HEMMER: Also, there are possible, and repeating, possible new anthrax cases being monitored in New Jersey and Delaware. Anthrax also detected in trace amounts at a company near Indianapolis, a postal facility in Kansas City and on mail bags arriving at the U.S. Embassy overseas in Lithuania.

Also overseas, in Afghanistan, Northern Alliance troops say U.S. planes bombed Taliban held villages north of Kabul today. One witness says hundreds of Taliban fighters are headquartered there. The Pentagon also denying Taliban claims that a hospital in Kandahar in the south was hit yesterday by U.S. bombs. And the White House disputing the Taliban's claim that the bombing campaign has so far taken 1,500 lives.

Meanwhile, the country of Turkey the first Muslim nation to commit troops to the U.S.-led coalition. We heard about this yesterday. And today Turkey does say it will send 90 special forces to help train anti-Taliban troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

In Washington, the House votes today on an airline security bill and it's expected to be close there today. Democrats want baggage and passenger screeners to be federal employees. Some Republicans and the White House prefer federal authorities to supervise the private workforce at the nation's airports.

Other news, a report this morning says Microsoft and the Justice Department have agreed now to a tentative settlement in their historic anti-trust case. That agreement could avert a trial on how the software giant is to be punished for violating anti-trust laws. The A.P., Associated Press, saying 18 state attorneys general have yet to sign off, though, on that deal.

Also, 1970s radical Sara Jane Olson pleaded guilty yesterday. This, to charges of possessing bombs with intent to kill L.A. police officers. Prosecutors claim Olson, whose real name is Kathleen Solia, was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army back in 1975. That's when bombs, they say, were planted underneath police patrol cars. No one was hurt then. But 26 years later, Olson says she admitted her guilt because after 9-11 she felt she could no longer get a fair trial. Olson set to be sentenced now in the month of December.

You're up to date. Another one coming up at the bottom of the hour. Back to New York now and Paula. 2-2, by the way.

ZAHN: I know that.

HEMMER: Yes?

ZAHN: I didn't stay up till midnight, but a lot of other people did.

HEMMER: There we go. I knew it was a question of time before we were going to get to that, right?

ZAHN: The stroke of midnight. 2-2.

HEMMER: See you later.

ZAHN: Go Yankees.

All right, thanks, Bill.

Back to the dreaded subject of anthrax this morning. Kathy Nguyen's neighbors say they are stunned and scared. Here was a healthy woman who suddenly dies from a deadly bacteria without explanation.

Our Gary Tuchman spoke with her neighbors in the Bronx.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For more than 20 years, she lived in Apartment 3R in the Bronx. Kathy Nguyen, sitting down in this picture, immigrated from Vietnam following the war. Her only son died in a car accident. She was 61 when she died Wednesday morning from inhalation anthrax.

GENAY ESPINA, NEIGHBOR: She was a beautiful person, nice.

TUCHMAN: Genay Espina lives next door. On the other side of the hall lives Juan Gonzales, who saw Kathy Nguyen on Sunday, the day she was admitted to the hospital.

JUAN GONZALES, NEIGHBOR: She told me she was sick.

TUCHMAN (on camera): She told you she was sick?

GONZALES: Yes. I said I am going with you, you know, call the hospital, to the ambulance or something. So I mean, you know, I work at the hospital. Then when I see the super, and go in the hospital.

TUCHMAN: She told you that she didn't need you to call an ambulance, that she'll ask the super for help?

GONZALES: Yes.

TUCHMAN: The neighbors here are saddened, stunned and scared. And some remember having conversations with Kathy Nguyen inside her apartment about anthrax.

ESPINA: I told her when they said it in the news like she was working and I told her just be careful because they said it in the news. They're sending some letters with a powder inside. When you are going to open your mail be careful that you, you know, you don't get a stranger's envelope and you open it. And she says oh, thank you for telling me because I didn't hear about it.

TUCHMAN (voice-over): Kathy Nguyen's apartment is being tested for anthrax. The other apartments in the building are not yet. Police and medical investigators did conduct interviews with tenants on Wednesday. But with children trick or treating and life going on as normal in the building, residents are frightened.

ANNA RODRIGUEZ, NEIGHBOR: I have such a pain in my heart. And what's going through my mind is scared for myself and all the other tenants that live in the building because we don't know how she contacted this disease. And, you know, we feel like we could get it too.

TUCHMAN: On the day she died she actually received mail from the postman, who did his work with gloves.

(on camera): Any unusual mail that you ever noticed?

UNIDENTIFIED MAIL CARRIER: No, I didn't notice any. It was regular mail, that's what I knew.

TUCHMAN: Just regular mail?

UNIDENTIFIED MAIL CARRIER: Yes.

TUCHMAN (voice-over): Her neighbors say she worked long hours at the hospital and hadn't traveled in years. And they add they can't believe what has happened to her.

Gary Tuchman, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAHN: New York City officials are calling Kathy Nguyen's death a homicide. Now, investigators are tracking her movements in the final days of her life, trying to find the link to anthrax.

Jason Carroll is at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, where the woman died, with the latest on parts of that investigation -- good morning, Jason. What do we know this morning?

JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And good morning to you, Paula.

I've got to tell you that at this point investigators simply do not know much. This case really has them baffled. They are still trying to figure out exactly how Kathy Nguyen was exposed to anthrax spores. What they're going to do is they're going to retrace her steps over the past two weeks. A CDC environmental team has checked the hospital where she's worked. They also checked out her apartment. So far those environmental tests have come back negative. More tests need to be done.

Also, investigators are going to be checking into another suspicious case at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital. That is the hospital where Kathy Nguyen worked. Apparently there is another employee there that has a suspicious lesion. Test results are still pending.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. NEAL COHEN, NEW YORK CITY HEALTH COMMISSIONER: It's a very non-specific lesion. It erupted very shortly before our staff were there, our doctors were there, and this person sort of presented to one of our doctors and given the reason that we were there, we thought it would be prudent to do a skin biopsy and not wait any longer.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARROLL: Health officials are also going to be paying close attention to Nguyen's clothes. When she checked into Lenox Hill Hospital on Sunday, her clothes were bagged. A preliminary test revealed that there were traces of anthrax spores on her clothes, but health officials say even more tests need to be done on that, and even if those tests come back positive, there's still no indication that could lead them to the source of the anthrax -- Paula.

ZAHN: Thanks so much, Jason.

We'll check back in with you a little bit later on this morning.

The fact that Kathy Nguyen had no connection to the postal service or the media has investigators stumped, as Jason just said. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is trying to identify the source of her contamination.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the institute director and comes to us from Washington this morning. Welcome back, sir. Good to see you this morning.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: Good morning.

ZAHN: Are we any closer to figuring out exactly how Kathy Nguyen contracted anthrax?

FAUCI: Actually not. As you've just heard on the show, it really still remains very puzzling and very perplexing. The way investigators, the CDC and other forensic approaches approach a case like this is to try and look for any possible lead, any possible connection with a pattern.

Thus far, there doesn't seem to be any connection with the original paradigm -- government, media, mail room. One of the ways that you can determine the evolution of a pattern is, in fact, if you get other people infected. Now, obviously we hope that that is not the case and that it does not evolve. But to just have an isolated case like this with no connection to anything that we have experienced thus far is very perplexing. That's why there's an extraordinary intensity in the investigation to try and sort these things out.

ZAHN: What does it suggest to you that so far the environmental tests, at least that they've gotten the results back, have come back negative, but there was the presence of spores found on her clothing? What does that mean?

FAUCI: I don't think -- I'm not so sure, Paula, that that really tells you much, except clearly this woman was exposed. She had an overwhelming disease from the inhalation anthrax. The getting of material on her clothes could have been the same process upon which it went into her airways through her lung to give her inhalation anthrax.

The fact that there's no other contamination thus far that's been identified, either in her workplace or in her home, again, is perplexing. It tells you that there may have been an exposure someplace as.

As we've just heard, there's the possibility that a coworker has a skin lesion. That needs to be sorted out. It hasn't been definitively shown yet that that's anthrax. If that is, that's certainly a lead, because it brings it to the workplace as opposed to having a total net out there of any other possibility where she could have been contaminated.

ZAHN: So how concerned are you about an escalation of this anthrax terror, just based on these two cases we're talking about this morning?

FAUCI: Well, obviously, there is concern because it's not falling into the patterns that we have seen. Either this is an outlier and we don't realize it yet, of a pattern that is an established pattern or it's the sentinel case in an evolving different pattern. If that's the case, then obviously that's of great concern because if there are other ways and other modalities of spreading this, which we know that there are, what we don't know is if the perpetrators have already initiated that. If they have, then we have to be very, very vigilant and very careful with an extraordinarily intensive investigation to try and stay ahead of what this pattern is in order to protect the public in ways to suggest or to operate with them where we can do things that'll prevent further tragic cases such as this.

ZAHN: We already know that a lot of people who worked in that hospital are taking antibiotics now as a precaution.

FAUCI: Right.

ZAHN: Do you see that net widening? Do you see potentially thousands more New Yorkers perhaps going on an antibiotic? FAUCI: That's an excellent question. We don't know that right now and that's why we'll have to react to what the pattern is. There will be, I'm certain, an evolving pattern. If this just stops here and it's a dead end, the bad news is that we'll never know what happened. But the good news is that it's not the beginning of another pattern that needs to be reacted to.

But it is entirely conceivable that as things evolve over the next day or so that we may need to widen the approach not only of the vigilance, but actually the reaction vis-a-vis antibiotics. But that just is going to have to wait to see how these things evolve.

ZAHN: I'd love for you to give us the context this morning for what the head of the CDC said last week about the prospect of cross- contamination. He said that was virtually impossible. Several days later, he amended that and said it was a possibility. What's going on here?

FAUCI: Well, I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say cross-contamination. In other words...

ZAHN: Particularly, I think he was referring to letters, an infected letter perhaps touching another letter and someone getting sick from that.

FAUCI: Yes, if you look at the people who understand the physical aspects of these spores, the weapons people who have made them, not only for the United States but people who have defected over here give you information. It's not absolute and it's imperfect. But what they say is that if you have a small amount of spore -- and I think this is what you're referring to with regard to what was stated the other day -- and that spore aerosolizes, goes up and then comes back down on a surface, be that a letter or a table, it is extraordinarily unlikely that that material is going to reaerosolize and give someone inhalation anthrax.

That's what they tell us about the spores and the experience that they have. Now, this is an area that very few physicians, scientists, for the federal government or otherwise, have any other experience with. But the weapons makers tell us that, that that's an unusual situation.

Is it impossible? Obviously not. We don't know that. But it is the information that we're getting that has led people to say that it would be unlikely that something would come up, go back down on the letter and then all of a sudden reaerosolize back to give pulmonary.

This is the reason why people are saying that the inhalation anthrax that someone gets is much more likely to be a primary event, namely, opening up something, getting a puff of smoke or a deliberate, a deliberate installation of this material in a way that would enter the lungs. I think that's what you've been hearing and why there's that confusion about whether something could be on an inanimate object and then come up from that if it's in a very low concentration.

ZAHN: Well, Dr. Fauci, thank you for your help this morning in trying to figure out exactly what's going on here. As you even admitted, the confusion continues to arise around this one case in New York.

FAUCI: Right. It does.

ZAHN: Thank you again for your time this morning.

FAUCI: You're welcome.

ZAHN: Appreciate your dropping by.

FAUCI: Right.

O'BRIEN: Still to come in our program, one-on-one with the head of Bayer, the maker of Cipro. Willow Bay with an interview you'll see only on CNN. Also ahead, U.S. intelligence gathering in Afghanistan -- a former CIA director will weigh in. And in our next hour, our Jeanne Meserve on detecting anthrax -- a look at the future of sniffing out bioweapons in America.

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