A 94-year-old woman from a rural Connecticut town on Wednesday became the fifth person in the United States to die from inhalation anthrax in a baffling case that revived fears of bioterrorism following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Ottilie Lundgren, who lived alone in the farming community of Oxford, died at 10:32 am EST (1532 GMT) five days after she was admitted to Griffin Hospital in nearby Derby, Connecticut, the hospital's president Patrick Charmel said.
The latest case of inhalation anthrax, a potential germ warfare agent, was the first in rural America and raised fresh alarms following a three-week period without any new cases since the last death, in New York.
"It's very scary," said Lundgren's neighbor Jodi McCue. "You would never have expected Oxford or a 94-year-old woman who stays at home all the time to ever have something like this happen.
"With terrorism and things that have happened lately, you expect New York to be a target. But Oxford?" she said. "I can't explain it and I'm very scared."
US officials said they had no clues so far as to how the woman contracted the disease.
"There is mystery to this case," Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told reporters during a telephone briefing. "We do not know how she was exposed to anthrax. All possibilities are being investigated."
Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aided by the FBI and state troopers, said they hoped testing of her home and places she visited would yield clues. Results will take about two days to process.
Since early October, four people had died and 13 others been infected with anthrax, a livestock disease that can be used as a germ warfare agent.
Three of the four previous anthrax deaths occurred in people age 55 or older and the woman's age may have made her less able to defend against anthrax spores than younger people, health officials said.
"That may be highly significant as to why she got infected and somebody else might have just brushed it off and no one would have ever noticed it," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Suspicions point to mail
Investigators have still not determined who is behind the anthrax attacks, but Attorney General John Ashcroft has indicated authorities are leaning toward a domestic source.
"It's rather extraordinary if you think about a 94-year-old woman in Oxford, Connecticut getting anthrax," Connecticut Gov. John Rowland told reporters. "The obvious question is why her?
"Granted, at her age, she did not travel a great deal. So that's why the suspicions lead directly to the mail. Some sort of cross contamination," he added.
All of those infected so far have been associated with the mail, the media or Capitol Hill, except for a New York hospital worker who died on October 31.
As Griffin Hospital officials announced Lundgren's death, a woman brought a suspicious envelope she feared might contain anthrax to the hospital's emergency room. Preliminary test results for anthrax were negative.
In Washington, a small amount of anthrax was detected in the Education Department's main mailroom, which was then sealed and the ventilation system in the room shut down.
Rowland said the postal employee who delivers Lundgren's mail had been treated with antibiotics and Jon Steele, head of the US Postal Service's northeast region, said all 1,500 postal workers at Connecticut's two primary distribution centers in Wallingford and Seymour were offered treatment.
Rowland said authorities had checked the woman's local post office as late as November 11 and had found no problems there.
"Now we begin to believe that something possibly could have happened after the 11th. But we still have no evidence it's from the mail. It's a mystery to us but the FBI and the CDC are going to continue to work on it," he said.
Lundgren, a widow whose husband died in 1977, lived alone in Oxford. She was admitted to the 160-bed Griffin Hospital in Derby last Friday with symptoms corresponding to pneumonia.
Within hours of her arrival she was treated with antibiotics as the first of five tests showed she had anthrax, doctors said.
(China Daily November 22, 2001)
