Last Updated

30 Dec 2002

Source: Newsweek, October 22, 2001.

Anxious about Anthrax

A few cases do not an epidemic make. But they’re unprecedented; worry over what’s next is contagious

By Sharon Begley and Michael Isikoff

EXCERPT

... On Oct. 12 in New York City, NBC News assistant Erin O’Connor (case 2) tested positive for cutaneous anthrax, apparently the result of exposure to a powder in an envelope she had opened three weeks before. ...

...Although seemingly every sicko with a grudge had decided that there’s nothing like an anthrax threat to strike terror in the heart of your target, the copycat threats that followed the Florida case seemed empty -- until Oct. 12. Before dawn that morning the FBI learned that the anthrax bug had hit New York. NBC, the FBI reported, had received a suspicious business letter addressed to "Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw. Postmarked St. Petersburg, Fla., it arrived Sept. 25, with no return address. When Brokaw’s assistant, Erin O’Connor, opened it, she found white powder and a note: "The unthinkable. See what happens next." NBC’s security office called the FBI, which picked up the letter the next day. Within days O’Connor, 38, developed a rash below her left collarbone. After it became more irritated, ulcerous and necrotic (filled with dead tissue), she saw a doctor. The Cipro he prescribed on Oct. 1 cleared the lesion. But it was a call from one of O’Connor’s doctors to the city Health Department, reporting a possible case of anthrax, and a call from the city to the FBI, that lit a fire under the bureau. The FBI ordered tests on the powder in the letter O’Connor opened, as well as a skin biopsy from O’Connor, at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

O’Connor tested positive for cutaneous anthrax. But the powder tested negative. When the FBI interviewed O’Connor more extensively, she recalled that she had gotten another letter, postmarked Sept. 18. She hadn’t thought anything of it. But, she finally remembered, it did contain some kind of dark, sandlike powder. That letter, postmarked Trenton, N.J., contained traces of anthrax, the FBI reported over the weekend. The delay in identifying the powder, and O’Connor’s lesions, confirmed fears that neither public-health officials nor law-enforcement agencies will recognize bioterrorism quickly. That would be especially horrific if the bug were a contagious microbe such as smallpox.