Reports of suspected anthrax diminishing

Fear of opening a letter or package and finding deadly white powder apparently has died down locally.

Lt. Tracy Lemonds, anti-terrorism coordinator for the Cape Girardeau Police Department, said calls reporting suspected anthrax contamination have decreased significantly in the past week.

The fear of anthrax in Cape Girardeau was an issue when the first cases were reported, "but it wasn't overwhelming," Lemonds said.

Lemonds is one of several federal, state and local officers who are members of an anti-terrorism task force for Eastern Missouri.

The U.S. Postal Service is mailing postcards with tips on how to recognize and handle suspicious mail.

Four people have died of inhaled anthrax since tainted letters were mailed in mid-September, and 13 others are fighting either the inhaled or milder skin form of the disease.

But it has been nine days since the last confirmed diagnosis.

"I know I'm breathing a sigh of relief after having a week go by without any new cases, said Toni Charles, manager of customer services at the Cape Girardeau post office. "Hopefully, that's all the post office is going to see, but I don't think bin Laden and his group is through with our country yet."

Anthrax was detected last week in two of 19 samples taken in a Kansas City, Mo., postal center. The two positives were found in a trash bag that contained discarded envelopes from mail that traveled to Kansas City from a contaminated postal facility in Washington.

Workers at the Kansas City center are among tens of thousands of Americans who are taking antibiotics for 60 days to prevent anthrax infection because they may have been exposed to the bacteria. It can incubate for up to two months before causing illness.

The local post office is taking precautions similar to those ordered across the country, Charles said. She is optimistic the problem has been contained.

In Washington, thousands of pounds of mail addressed to government agencies have been piling up since an anthrax-tainted letter arrived at Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office Oct. 15. The Postal Service said Tuesday it had begun sanitizing this mail and would start delivering it within 24 to 48 hours.

The Postal Service hired a second company to cleanse the mail by irradiating it. Facilities in Bridgeport, N.J., and Lima, Ohio, are tackling that massive effort. Each site is expected to cleanse about 750,000 pieces of mail a day, most coming from Washington, New Jersey and New York, where anthrax contamination was confirmed in some post offices.

More post offices around the country were being tested for possible contamination.

In other developments:

Postal inspectors are responding to an average of 600 incidents of suspicious mail every day, many of them hoaxes. Twenty-five people have been arrested, and other charges are pending in the hoaxes.

Four contaminated postal facilities remain closed: Washington's Brentwood and the Trenton, N.J., processing centers, a small postal station in the Pentagon and the specialty mail-order facility in Kansas City.

Staff writer Andrea L. Buchanan contributed to this report.