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American Morning

Early Results on Letter to Vermont's Patrick Leahy Positive for Anthrax

Aired November 19, 2001 - 07:24   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: On Capitol Hill, two Senate office buildings reopen this morning after anthrax testing over the weekend. Early results on a letter to Vermont's Patrick Leahy are positive for anthrax. And this letter does have some similarities to one sent to Senator Tom Daschle.

The envelopes have the same return address and were postmarked on the same date, October 9. The handwriting, as you can see if you were to hold these two up side by side, is similar. Investigators are hoping this letter might bring them closer to a possible suspect.

Dr. Ivan Walks is Washington, D.C.'s chief medical officer. He has been involved in the anthrax attacks since the first letter came to light. Welcome back. Good to have you with us this morning, sir.

DR. IVAN WALKS, D.C. CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER: Good morning.

ZAHN: I guess probably you even have to admit the only good news about this letter is the FBI got to it before it ever met its intended recipients and because of that, as I understand it, some of the forensic evidence might be in place, possible fingerprints, possible DNA evidence. What kind of clues might this letter hold for investigators?

WALKS: Well, we've had a very good weekend looking at this letter. We had a conference call on Saturday that involved Capitol Hill, the local health community here, really talking about two things. One is what public health consequences the letter may hold and then what it may do to help us answer three very important questions -- who put anthrax in the mail, have they used all they had and is the mail going to be sterilized so that we all feel a lot more comfortable. Those are three things that we really have to focus on before we can say everything is fine.

ZAHN: Are you able to answer any of those questions this morning, the tough questions you just posed yourself?

WALKS: Well, I don't think we can and I think that the good news about this letter is that it was quickly sequestered along with the mail. No one has been exposed to this letter for over a month. So we don't feel the public health consequences really exist. We think that the people we've protected with our firewall still are the folks that need to be protected and that is good news. ZAHN: So that means no one else, then, will be -- you won't recommend anybody else that they take antibiotics?

WALKS: No.

ZAHN: You think they got them in the first go around?

WALKS: Yes, we did, because there was never an assumption in the public health community that we knew how many letters there were. We've always refused to speculate on the law enforcement aspects about this. I think we are absolutely depending on the FBI, the other law enforcement folks to do their job. We're doing our job and our job is not to make guesses about how many letters there could be. We know there's more than one letter. That's enough for us to be conservative.

ZAHN: I know you've had to rely on the information you were getting from the CDC, and we've talked about this with you a lot over the last several weeks. But if you were armed with the information you had today, what would you have done differently in terms of trying to treat those postal workers at the Brentwood facility?

WALKS: Well, I think we would have done what we did over this past weekend. There's no ego involved in public health. We get on the phone. We had Lieutenant Nichols from the Capitol Hill police on the phone. We had the attending physician's office on the phone, the local health people on the phone. And we talked together about how we can best protect our community. And I think if we had known a few weeks ago what we know now, that same comprehensive conference call with the regional health departments on the phone would have happened and we would have gotten to those folks quicker.

The other thing we would have known several weeks ago is to help the medical detectives, the doctors in the emergency room, identify what is a suspicious patient. We did some of that. I think we did save some lives. Knowing what we know now, we probably could have saved the two gentlemen who unfortunately died.

ZAHN: Wow. I'm sure the families don't find that too reassuring, though, at this point, do they? Are you still feeling that sense of loss and the fact that, as you said, the medical community had to play catch-up?

WALKS: Well, I'm a physician. I took a vow to do no harm and to save lives. And I think that we are all relatively comfortable that we did the best with what we knew. But I don't think that's any comfort to the families. And every time we have a postal worker who dies, this question comes up, did they die from anthrax? And we spend a lot of time investigating those cases, reassuring families of the other postal workers that no, we have contained this particular outbreak.

But I think we should be very cautious to think that it's all over and we're fine. We are certainly not relaxing.

ZAHN: I guess for a good, very good reason, indeed. Dr. Ivan Walks, always good to have you with us. Thank you very much for your thoroughness, as usual.

WALKS: Thank you.

ZAHN: Appreciate your time. Good luck.

WALKS: Thank you. Take care.

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