Monday October 22, 2001

WASHINGTON -- A District of Columbia postal worker is "gravely ill" with inhaled anthrax, leading government officials to order the testing of an additional 2,150 mail employees, Mayor Anthony Williams said yesterday.

The unidentified man, the third person to come down with the most serious form of the disease, checked into a suburban hospital on Friday and was diagnosed yesterday morning, said Dr. Ivan Walks, chief health officer for the city.

Janice Moore, a spokeswoman for Inova Fairfax Hospital, said the man is in serious condition: "He is acutely ill."

More than 2,000 employees at the Brentwood central mail processing center for the nation's capital and another 150 employees at the air mail handling center near Baltimore-Washington International Airport will be tested for exposure to anthrax spores and receive treatment beginning yesterday, Williams said.

"We're going to do everything we can and everything we have to do," he said.

Postal inspector Ken Weaver said how the worker with inhaled anthrax was exposed was still being investigated.

"We're trying to trace that down and get to the bottom of this," Weaver said on CNN. "We don't know if there was anything that may have broken open. We don't know what he touched whatever he did touch. That's part of the investigation and we'll get to the bottom of it."

Dr. John Eisold, the U.S. Capitol physician, said 4,500 to 5,000 people have been tested for anthrax since a letter containing anthrax was discovered last Monday in Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office. Twenty-eight of those have tested positive for exposure to anthrax but none have contracted the disease, Eisold said.

He said confirmation of inhalation anthrax at the Washington post office "does not alter how we are treating our patient population here."

The sweep through the Capitol complex continued yesterday. House and Senate leaders were to be briefed on findings late in the day and planned to hold a news conference to announce whether the Capitol would open today, Capitol Police Lt. Dan Nichols said.

Officials said they hoped to be able to open the Capitol itself in time for the House and Senate to reconvene on Tuesday. But one official who spoke on condition of anonymity said House leaders also were looking at Ft. McNair, a military installation near the Capitol, as an alternative location.

Nineteen buildings including and surrounding the Capitol have undergone environmental surveys and anthrax spores have been found in four of them, Nichols said.

Walks said it was not known immediately if the man was exposed from the same letter found in Daschle's office.

The man is the ninth person to be diagnosed with anthrax since a Florida man died early this month. Six of the victims have been exposed through the skin, a less serious form of the disease.

The latest patient was exposed through his respiratory system, a much more serious form of the disease. But he is being treated with antibiotics and is expected to make a full recovery, Walks said.

Dan Mihalko, a U.S. Postal Inspection Service official in Washington, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began testing employees at the Brentwood facility's government mail section for possible anthrax exposure a few days ago.

He said the CDC also ran tests on the mail machinery.

Sen. Bill Frist, a doctor before he joining the Senate, said the victim faces a more uncertain future than those who were exposed through the skin. The only person to die from anthrax during this scare had the inhalation form of the disease, though it was not caught as early.