Friday November 2, 2001

WASHINGTON - The fear of anthrax spread to the Midwest yesterday with a preliminary finding of contamination at a Kansas City, Mo. postal facility. Investigators established a link between the death of a woman in New York and more than a dozen cases of the disease elsewhere in the country.

The bacteria that killed Kathy T. Nguyen were ``indistinguishable from all the others," including the strain in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, said Dr. Steven Ostroff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials said they had not yet learned how she became sick.

Nearly one month into America's bioterrorism scare, the threat seemed to be receding in the nation's capital, but New Jersey asked the Bush administration for help in testing all the state's post offices. It appears the state "is the front line of the anthrax attack on our nation," wrote acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco.

In a cruel irony, officials said the suspected spores found in Kansas City, had likely been exported from the nation's capital.

"The assumption at this point is that this is a contamination process from Brentwood," the main postal facility in Washington that has been shut down for more than a week, said Rex Archer, the Kansas City health director. The idea is that spores "settled out of the air and got on these envelopes."

The preliminary test results at a specialty postal facility - coupled with the discovery of spores at a private Indiana company - marked the first known spread of spores off the East Coast in the nation's month-long struggle with bioterrorism. The results were predictable.

More than 170 postal workers in the Kansas City area joined thousands of other Americans on antibiotics and local officials moved quickly to reassure the public.