Last Updated

13 Jul 2003

Source: Washington Post, May 10, 2002.

Fed Mail to Be Tested For Anthrax Spores

By Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post Staff Writer

The Federal Reserve Board said yesterday that it had detected anthrax spores in several batches of letters and has sent about 20 pieces of mail to a laboratory for further tests.

The suspect letters were discovered during routine, random testing outside the Fed's downtown headquarters late Tuesday and early Wednesday by screeners wearing protective suits.

Preliminary field tests are often inaccurate. FBI officials said the initial tests may have yielded "false positives," which have proven fairly common during the anthrax scare.

"The affected mail was routine commercial and business mail and did not have any of the characteristics identified by the FBI as suspicious," according to a Fed statement.

"There was no personal mail, no handwritten addresses, no powder and nothing detected," Fed spokesman David Skidmore said. The screeners sent "several small batches" of mail to a lab, Skidmore said. He said he did not know when test results would be available.

Since October's anthrax attacks, the Fed has handled all mail outside its downtown headquarters in a secure trailer, where it is subjected to random daily testing, he said.

Trace amounts of anthrax spores were found at the Fed in December, but investigators said at the time that they were probably the result of cross-contamination. Further testing found no other spores.

U.S. Postal Inspector Daniel L. Mihalko said every piece of the Fed's mail is irradiated by the Postal Service before it arrives at the trailer. Although this procedure kills anthrax spores, he said, it does not preclude the possibility that dead spores could produce a positive swab test.

Meanwhile, Scott Hatch, a spokesman for the Office of Personnel Management, said last night that the agency had closed its mailroom after tests found one anthrax spore. The spore was found in a batch of material collected for a test April 29. Subsequent tests May 2 and 6 were negative.

Staff writers Dan Eggen and Stephen Barr contributed to this report.