Mercer County resident contracts anthrax in state's first non-postal case
By JEAN SU
Princetonian Staff Writer
A 51-year-old woman living in Mercer County, N.J., left a local hospital Oct. 28 after being treated for a case of skin anthrax.
The woman remains the only non-postal worker to have contracted the bacteria in New Jersey.
Though state health officials are withholding the victim's name, one official, who wished to remain anonymous, released information on the woman's hospital testing.
A lesion that developed on the woman's forehead originally spurred her to undergo analysis. "She initially tested negative for anthrax," the official explained. The hospital diagnosed her with a different ailment and gave her antibiotics.
"Anthrax tests can be somewhat inaccurate," Hamilton Township's mayoral aide Richard McClellan said. "They have their positive aspects and flaws."
A biopsy later confirmed that the woman had been wrongly diagnosed and had contracted skin anthrax.
Because time passed since her first test, the woman had no recollection of where she could have contracted the bacteria, throwing investigators off any leads they had.
Though the public and several news sources have speculated that the victim was exposed to anthrax through mail delivered by the United States Postal Service, officials denied this claim due to lack of evidence.
"We will probably never know [the source of her exposure]," McClellan said. "Investigators haven't found contamination in either site [her home or office]."
FBI investigators, according to McClellan, tested the victim's home, work place and the group of condominium offices surrounding hers — including U.S. Rep. Chris Smith's district office — for the presence of the bacteria. They did not find a trace of anthrax at any of these sites.
In an interview with a CNN correspondent Wednesday, Smith said he "did not believe he had been the target of any tainted letters."
The reasons why she would be targeted are overshadowed by a more significant and urgent question: the means by which she contracted anthrax. "Officials have no idea about a.) how she got sick and b.) whether it was blind luck that she was three doors down from Chris Smith," McClellan said.
The 16th American to contract anthrax, the woman "is expected to fully recover," the health official said.
October 31, 2001
By DAVID ROBINSON
Princetonian Staff Writer
The University is suspending delivery of outside mail, two days after the discovery of a small amount of anthrax prompted the closure of the main Princeton post office, which is located off of Route One.
Lauren Robinson-Brown '85, University Director of Communications, explained that the University's mail normally flows through the now-closed facility.
"There's no reason to believe, unless there is a suspicious letter that meets the guidelines we have posted on the website, that any mail we receive has anthrax contamination," she said. "Any measure we take is precautionary in nature."
Robinson-Brown explained that the University is putting its mail handling staff through a compulsory safety-training program.
She added that members of the mail-handling staff are not being tested for anthrax. "The state hasn't changed their guidelines in terms of what they will respond to in providing testing of people, places or substances, and in terms of independent resources, resources are being taxed and so there's just no one available to do it," she explained.
The University has also chosen not to offer antibiotics to its mail handling staff. "I have to emphasize, our health officials do not want people on antibiotics unless a high index of suspicion has been reached. If people are over-medicated, it will actually prevent health officials from responding with reasonable means. They're not going to, as a precaution, put people on prophylactic treatment," Robinson-Brown said.
"Given that the processing of mail in various parts of the country, including New Jersey, has slowed down, we are being appropriately sensitive and flexible with respect to our deadlines," a statement posted on the University's admissions website said. "We assume (hope) that you have made copies of your application."
Meanwhile, the FBI has continued working on campus. "Our focus has centered around New Jersey, and yes, the Trenton area," an FBI spokeswoman said. The University has repeatedly stated that it is not engaged in any biological research with anthrax.
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November 12, 2002
By DAVID ROBINSON
Princetonian Staff Writer
The New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services has announced that a trace of anthrax was found inside a letter carrier case at the Palmer Square post office in the heart of Princeton Borough. The area where the anthrax was found was cleaned early Saturday before the post office opened.
Palmer Square was one of about 50 local post offices that were tested for anthrax because their mail is sorted at the Hamilton mail processing facility, where postal workers have contracted the inhalation form of the disease. Palmer Square was among four post offices that had one trace of anthrax each, while a fifth post office had an ambiguous test result. No anthrax was found in any of the other offices tested.
At the Hamilton facility, on the other hand, swabs in 34 separate locations tested positive for anthrax, according to state health department spokesman Dennis McGowan.
Because the amount of anthrax found in the Palmer Square building is so small, state officials have determined that the risk of postal workers developing the disease is extremely low.
State Epidemiologist Eddy Bresnitz said in a press release that none of the workers at the four offices with positive test results have come down with the illness.
According to state health officials, the positive reading is most likely the result of cross-contamination with mail from the Hamilton facility.
They said that there is no need to close these post offices in response to the anthrax finding.
This is Case 18 by UCLA's reckoning. The patient is a bookkeeper and thus handles quite a bit of mail; the presumption is that she tore open a piece of mail cross-contaminated by the 10/9 (Leahy and Daschle) letters at the Hamilton Township processing facility where four postal workers were infected.
I thought that anthrax spores passed through envelope paper like sand through a sieve, but apparently the paper acts more like a sponge. Spores were absorbed by the Leahy and Daschle envelopes, then were squeezed out by the postal handling machinery. Other envelopes absorbed these spores in turn; when those cross-contaiminated envelopes were ripped, the spores along the tear became aerosolized. For Case 18, that meant contracting cutaneous anthrax through a small break in her facial skin (such as a pimple); for poor Otillie Lundgren, who habitually ripped her junk mail in half, that meant dying of inhalation anthrax. So the lesson for today, kids, is to use a letter opener, the sharper the better.