Months after anthrax scare, mail-safety goals are unmet
Thu Aug 29, 8:41 AM ET
Last fall, a jittery nation was shocked anew when a tabloid employee in Florida was diagnosed with anthrax. Robert Stevens' hospitalization was the first hint of a mail-borne biological attack that would close federal buildings in Washington, D.C., and strike terror across the East Coast. Stevens and four others died, and thousands more potentially exposed to the deadly disease -- from Connecticut suburbanites to U.S. senators -- received antibiotics.
The tragic episode spurred the U.S. Postal Service into promising a series of steps that would protect the public mail system from future biological attacks. Nearly a year later, the Postal Service says the mail is now safe.
Yet that assurance doesn't measure up to the facts. The USPS has failed to fulfill its promise to install equipment that would either detect or destroy lethal agents on all 650 million pieces of mail that pass through the system every day.
Indeed, terrorism experts and top specialists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tell USA TODAY that they believe an anthrax attack through the mail today would be detected the same way it was the last time -- when victims show up in hospital emergency rooms. ''Nothing done so far changes the fact (that) there remains ample opportunity to deliver biological weapons through the mail,'' says former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro.
Revised promises Such stinging indictments underscore the disconnect between the dangers that remain and the Postal Service's claims that it has dealt with the threat.
Last October, soon after the anthrax outbreak, USPS Senior Vice President Deborah Willhite told The Los Angeles Times that the Postal Service would quickly ''deploy nationally'' machinery that could detect and kill anthrax. At the same time, Postal Service Chief Operating Officer Patrick Donahoe told The Washington Post that the equipment could begin arriving at postal facilities in weeks to ''make it (the mail) safer.''
But the Postal Service soon backpedaled. Irradiating the nation's mail to kill deadly organisms would cost billions, an unaffordable amount for the deficit-saddled system. Moreover, the technology wasn't available to detect anthrax or other diseases.
Even so, the Postal Service continued to assure the public that it was working to make the mail safe. It promised that anthrax-killing irradiation equipment would be installed at ''key'' locations in the system, and 15 anthrax-detection-system prototypes would be in place within a few months. By March, the USPS had developed an official emergency preparedness plan that made installation of detection equipment the agency's second priority after decontaminating postal facilities in New Jersey and Washington, D.C.
Delayed deadlines Six months after drafting the emergency plan -- and spending hundreds of millions to develop safeguards -- the Postal Service has provided the public scant protection from another bioterrorist attack through the mail. Instead, it keeps pushing back dates for implementing new safeguards, while telling the public there is no problem.
As a result:
* Only one prototype of a machine capable of detecting anthrax is being tested. Legal delays in signing contracts to produce and install the devices mean it will take more than a year to place the equipment in the system's nearly 300 distribution centers.
* The Postal Service is decontaminating mail delivered to federal offices in Washington, D.C., and is working on plans to install irradiation machinery in a facility that handles all government mail in the nation's capital, a prime target for another terrorist attack. The rest of the nation won't get comparable protection because of the cost.
The Postal Service now admits that its early plans to fight anthrax were overly ambitious. But it says it is moving as quickly as possible to install reliable equipment.
Despite these delays, the service says it has taken some positive steps to protect the public: Postal employees are on high alert for suspicious packages and have spotted thousands that later proved harmless. The USPS also is installing vacuum and filtration systems in postal-sorting machinery across the USA to prevent the worker exposure and cross-contamination of mail blamed for most of the anthrax deaths.
But the USPS has never conducted reliable evaluations of its detection system similar to the federal tests that check whether airport screeners let weapons through. And only 2% of sorting facilities have new vacuum and filtration systems.
Instead of issuing false assurances, postal executives need to admit that dangers still exist and set realistic goals for making all mail safe. Then it has to deliver.