When a ricin threat surfaced on Capitol Hill recently, Washington postal supervisors exposed workers to a potentially deadly replay of the 2001 anthrax attacks

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 13, 2004

Byline: Timothy W. Maier, INSIGHT

For U.S. Postal Service employees the story is all too familiar. When a deadly white powder was discovered Feb. 2 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill employees immediately were quarantined, evacuated and sent to decontamination showers. Dirksen and the Hart and Russell Senate office buildings were closed for precautionary measures. Meanwhile, postal employees working at the V Street Post Office facility believed to have processed the tainted mail were told to shut up, to keep working and to finish their shifts.

This 2004 drama well could have been a deadly rerun of the 2001 anthrax attack that left two postal workers dead and more questions than answers after letters containing deadly spores were mailed to two Senate Democratic leaders, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle of South Dakota. The difference is that this time the powder was not anthrax but ricin, a deadly poison easily manufactured from the castor bean, Ricinus communis, which is legal to grow. The castor oil from the plant has been used safely in products ranging from laxatives and patent medicines to lubricants for high-performing engines, but ricin is a killer.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) classify ricin as a "B" weapon, or moderate threat, because it is considered more likely to be used by an assassin bent on murder than by terrorists. It does not reproduce like bacteria, and the illnesses that it causes are not contagious, so mass casualties are unlikely. But if colorless and odorless ricin were dropped into a food or water supply, or even applied to door handles, it could cause many deaths and result in a terror panic. Ricin can be spread as an aerosol, injected, or mixed with a powerful solvent and absorbed through the skin. Exposure leads to respiratory distress, fever, cough, nausea, severe dehydration, circulatory collapse and death within three days. There is no antidote.

Contamination by ricin produces a slow and painful death. So does anthrax poisoning, as evident in the 2001 outbreak that claimed five lives, including postal workers Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr. Both men were employed at the processing and distribution center on Brentwood Road in Northwest Washington. And evidence reported by Insight indicates managers there had knowledge that the facility tested positive for anthrax when they required employees to work an additional three days in a contaminated building. In fact, after the facility at last was shut down and declared a crime scene, senior postal managers defied police orders and ordered a handful of employees to return to the facility in the middle of the night to retrieve several tons of mail that could have been contaminated [see "Anthrax Fallout Hits Postal Service," Aug. 19-Sept. 1, 2003].

Though postal managers insist they acted properly in the ricin attack, the evidence again casts doubt. In fact, Insight has learned, postal workers at the V Street facility were required to grind out an additional nine-and-one-half hours of laborious processing after the ricin was discovered at 3 p.m. in the mail room of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). Postal employees report they were not evacuated until 12:30 a.m., long after tests confirmed ricin in the Dirksen building. Postal workers say their supervisors claimed ignorance about the ricin attack despite the fact it had been the lead news story all day.

Why weren't these employees evacuated immediately? "I don't know," says U.S. Postal Service (USPS) spokesman Bob Anderson, who nonetheless insists it wasn't clear that the ricin had been sent to the mail room through the mail because no "smoking gun" letter was found. The facility was shut down the next day, at which time tests for ricin there proved to be negative, and, besides, no one got sick and died, he says. Why not err, if need be, on the side of caution? "I don't know," Anderson says, putting any blame for the late call on the U.S. Capitol Police and the CDC.

Did the U.S. Capitol Police make that call not to check the postal route for poison? "It wasn't us," says a spokesman at the U.S. Capitol Police. CDC spokeswoman Kathy Harben says it has no regulatory authority to shut the facility under any circumstance. "We simply provide advice," she says. "We were in conference with the U.S. Postal Service and the Senate and Capitol Police," she notes. What did the CDC advise? "Evacuate," she answers. "We advised them to evacuate." The Senate did so immediately, but the USPS temporized.

In attempting again to explain the delay, Anderson says: "I don't know why we didn't do it right away. It may have taken that long to formulate what path the letter had taken assuming that there was a letter." He assures that there were "stand ups" at which senior managers provided information to employees about the ricin attack, but some employees tell Insight they were provided with no such information.

Meanwhile, the careful treatment afforded the contaminated Senate office of Majority Leader Frist may reflect his knowledge and training as a physician. After the incident, Frist told the public that processes had been put in place following the anthrax scare that now were "working very well," including irradiation of envelopes and clipping a corner of each envelope so that it could be shaken at an off-site U.S. postal facility before being carried to the Capitol. Frist did note that irradiation likely would have no effect on ricin because it is neither a virus nor a bacterium.