The new face of America

Just ten very, very long weeks ago, a 63-year-old man died in Florida. Tests confirmed that Bob Stevens, a tabloid photo editor who had emigrated from England three decades before, had died of inhalational anthrax - a disease so rare in the west that the previous three fatal cases known in the US dated back to 1948, 1951 and 1957, all of them in Philadelphia. The authorities immediately assured the American public that it was not "bioterrorism". Stevens had just been on a hiking weekend in North Carolina, and Tommy Thompson - the Bush administration's less-than-impressive health and human services secretary - soothingly pronounced that the death was a one-off, probably caused by drinking from a mountain stream contaminated by diseased animals.

But Thompson, the administration and the American public were at the beginning of a long, painful learning curve. Two weeks before Stevens's death, an assistant at the New York Post developed blisters, later confirmed as skin anthrax, on her fingers. Two postal workers in New Jersey went to their doctors with similar lesions on their arms. Erin O'Connor, secretary to the NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw, noticed a skin eruption on her arm. Four days before Stevens died, a 73-year-old mailroom worker in the same Florida tabloid office was admitted to hospital suffering from the more deadly inhalational anthrax.

Then, ten days after Stevens's death, a letter was opened in the office of the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, containing enough "weaponised" anthrax powder (as Daschle himself called it) to kill at least 100,000 people. Still the administration back-tracked, contradicting and embarrassing Daschle by insisting that the powder was not as sophisticated as he had claimed. But within a week, 31 people working at the Capitol had tested positive for anthrax, and hundreds - including many senators and congressmen and women - went on prophylactic antibiotics. Still nobody thought of the postal workers who had handled Daschle's deadly letter; within a week, Thomas Morris, 55, and Joseph Curseen, 47 - who both worked at the sorting office through which Daschle's letter had been routed - had died of inhalational anthrax.

Last week, after 18 confirmed cases, five deaths, a huge FBI investigation, and with at least 30,000 people on antibiotics, the administration finally confirmed what just about everybody had long suspected: that the anthrax sent to Daschle and Brokaw (and also to Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, in a letter recently discovered that has yet to be opened) was capable of killing at least half the population of Washington, and probably also cross-contaminated "tens of thousands" of items of mail. But Tommy Thompson offered his own unique brand of reassurance: "I'm happy to tell the American people that part of the mystery has been solved. But at the same time I'm concerned about the cross-contamination because you can't see these little buggers [the anthrax spores] and where's [sic] the next cross-contamination going to take place."

Dead on again, Tommy. Investigations into the deaths of Kathy Nguyen (a 61-year-old woman who lived in the Bronx in New York) on 31 October and Ottilie Lundgren (a 94-year-old widow from Oxford, Connecticut) three weeks later finally reached the only logical conclusion: that each had inhaled anthrax spores on mail they had received at home. Using the computerised records of post-office bar codes, detectives pinned down 100,000 addresses close to both Nguyen's and Lundgren's to which mail had been sent: more importantly, the records showed that on 9 October these probably critical letters passed through a sorting office in Trenton, New Jersey, within minutes of the Daschle and Leahy letters (which had been posted in Trenton).

In the case of Nguyen, a contaminated letter was probably sent to Art Auto Body, a business close to her home in the Bronx; that envelope presumably infected her mail, though none was found in her home after her death. A similarly contaminated letter was traced to the home of a family living a mile and a half from Lundgren; though she was an active old soul for 94, her immune system (like Nguyen's, it is now presumed) was doubtless susceptible to a relatively small amount of anthrax spores, which caused no harm to younger people. Now there are around a million pieces of mail in a kind of quarantined limbo (including, it seems, my October phone bill and my DC car registration licence), with nobody quite sure what to do about it; 286 drums of mail bound for Congressional offices are being irradiated, ruining enclosed film transparencies, computer disks, CD-roms and the like in the process.

Epidemiologists, meanwhile, are poring over the medical records of thousands of people who have died of flu-like symptoms in the past ten weeks, but who may not have been diagnosed as anthrax victims; my own doctor's surgery in Washington, a nurse there tells me, has been inundated with patients who fear they have anthrax (not hypochondriacal old ladies, but mainly worried yuppies who fear germs invading their sterile lives). Last weekend, emergency workers in protective suits and face masks pumped chlorine dioxide gas into Daschle's offices on the fifth and sixth floors of the Hart Senate building. That was supposed to kill lurking anthrax - which are now turning up here, there and everywhere - but then needed itself to be rendered harmless by sodium bisulfite pumped inside. Still, nobody wants to return there yet.

So, who or what is behind it all? The strains of anthrax sent to Daschle, Brokaw and Leahy are indistinguishable from each other: extremely lethal, containing as many as a trillion spores (which are less than a twentieth of the diameter of a human hair) per gram, which is one twenty-eighth of an ounce. A gallon of the stuff could wipe out the entire world population. Crucially, the strain - originally culled from a diseased cow in Ames, Iowa, in the 1950s and consequently known as "the Ames strain" - is identical to that produced by the US military itself in experiments dating back to 1951. In the early 1980s, when the west had grown complacent about the dangers of bioterrorism but was vaguely aware of a need to possess strains in order to produce vaccines, samples were passed on around the US and the world; private research laboratories in the US and the UK Chemical Defence Establishment in Porton Down, near Salisbury, were among the recipients.

This is where it all becomes complicated, and where the US is still desperately learning. US intelligence believed that around a dozen potentially aggressive countries - including Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, Syria, China, Egypt, Israel and Russia - possessed the capability of turning anthrax into a weapon. But they reckoned that none could turn it into the lethal concoction sent to Daschle et al, that what they call "the bad guys" could produce something only one-twentieth as strong. But nobody kept adequate track of the Ames strain or even its "Vollum 1B" derivative, which the US military developed for its own possible offensive purposes in the 1950s. How much of that strain was dispersed commercially or politically around the world, possibly not labelled correctly, is now the subject of frantic back-tracking investigation.

Around 1986-88 - with the approval of then President Reagan - Iraq obtained seven strains of anthrax from the US, possibly to use against its then baddy foe, Iran. In 1988, according to a 1999 UN report, Iraq obtained nearly 40 tons of material, from which it could grow anthrax and botulinum bacterium, from a British company, Oxoid Ltd. But the intelligence assessment has still remained that Iraq does not possess the capability to grind the spores into the in effect weightless, tiny weapons that have caused so much chaos and fear here.

All of which leads back to the likelihood that the deadly anthrax was sent by a disgruntled microbiologist, probably an American who had access to the strains produced by the US military in the 1950s and secretly retained his own samples as keepsakes. The FBI has long believed the culprit is someone similar to Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber": sophisticated, well-educated (not least about the protection of his own health), and mentally disturbed. The Daschle and Leahy letters each had return addresses (from "4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, NJ 08852") that showed a knowledge of US styles and traditions. In the notes inside, the date was written the American way, with the month before the day; the final invocation "Allah is Great", written in block English capitals, is deemed not to be the kind of phraseology a genuine Muslim would use.

That is comforting to the American public, which has probably suffered more strain and worry over anthrax (at least on the East Coast) than over the 11 September atrocities. Now the FBI is being reorganised; the Bush administration, having in effect torn up the 1972 international accord on biological terrorism last summer, has been in Geneva pressing other countries to enforce it. And a nervous nation remains on that steep, painful and unwelcome learning curve.