מתוך medicontext.co.il
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, told reporters during a telephone briefing Friday that his "working hypothesis" is that anthrax spores do not spread from a "criminal mailing" to another piece of mail.
It is unlikely, he said, that the State Department mail handler diagnosed with inhalation anthrax caught the disease by handling mail that was inadvertently contaminated with anthrax when it went through the Brentwood facility in Washington, DC. Experts believe it takes about 8000 anthrax spores to cause the inhalation form of the disease, he said.
The 59-year-old man, whose infection was announced Thursday, handles mail at the State Department's suburban Virginia postal center. That center is far from the Brentwood center where a tainted letter to Senator Tom Daschle was processed. The State Department center gets some mail from Brentwood, but Dr. Koplan said he suspects that an undiscovered intentionally tainted letter is behind the new case.
So far in the Washington, DC area, only the Daschle letter has been identified as being contaminated with anthrax. But new traces of anthrax bacteria keep showing up in mailrooms, most recently at the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Supreme Court and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
Dr. Koplan said there is no reason to believe the general public is in danger of receiving infectious mail. The CDC, he noted, has no plans to extend the precautionary use of antibiotics for workers at various mail centers to people who live in certain zip codes.
Meanwhile, health officials continue environmental testing of all Washington facilities "downstream" of the Brentwood center, and the postal service has begun environmental testing at 200 facilities on the East Coast. Thousands of postal workers in Washington, New York, New Jersey and Florida have been prescribed antibiotics as a precautionary measure.
To help allay any fear the public may have about their own mail, the postal service has also announced that it will begin irradiating mail in certain areas in order to kill infectious agents.
Dr. Koplan said that radiation can kill bacteria, but his agency has never studied whether x-ray devices can eliminate bacteria from mail.
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