NEW YORK - The mystery surrounding the death from anthrax of a 94-year-old woman in Connecticut on Wednesday deepened yesterday after preliminary test results showed no traces of the deadly spores either on the letter box at her house or in nearby postal facilities.
Officials greeted the results both as
good and news. They were surely reassuring for local postal workers.
Hundreds in the region surrounding Oxford, Connecticut, where the woman lived, had already started taking Cipro, the antibiotic that fights anthrax. But it meant that investigators were no closer to understand how the victim, Ottilie Lundgren, came into contact with anthrax in the first place.
They still believe, however, that she was the target of a criminal act. There remains a very, very slight possibility, officials conceded, that she was killed by naturally occurring anthrax. Since the bio-terror scare first erupted in the US in early October, five people have died from inhalation anthrax.
Most baffling have been the cases of Ms Lundgren, whose illness ended what had been a three-week lull in the crisis, and of Cathy Nguyen, a New York hospital worker. Nobody knows how either woman came into contact with the spores.
Chilean and US officials yesterday confirmed the first reported case of a deadly strain of the bacteria in a letter sent to a destination outside the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta confirmed that a letter sent from Switzerland to Chile was tainted with anthrax.
The letter had been sent to Dr. Antonio Banfi, a paediatrician at a children's hospital in Santiago.
- INDEPENDENT
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