After Anthrax: In Line With Our Worries
WASHINGTON – Exactly one week later, here I am againá standing in line with people waiting to be tested for anthrax exposure.
But I am not the subject of my own news story this time.
I am just one more reporter with a microphone, with a camera, with antibiotics in my shoulder bag, waiting at a D.C. hospital to get reactions from postal workers to the latest anthrax scare.
I look around at the men and women in their suit coats, blinking mechanically beneath the tall, thin spotlights balanced on the curbs for live shots. How many journalists and photographers here today are now on the Cipro antibiotic because they, like me, were on the fifth floor of the Senate Hart building last Monday when the anthrax-laced letter was sent to Senate leader Tom Daschle?
The media is a major anthrax target, said Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH) during a phone interview last week, warning reporters to watch out, too. But waiting in line at D.C. General Hospital, in hopes of speaking with the frightened postal workers from the Brentwood facility where the letter to Daschle was processed, I realize that no matter the intended target, be it Tom Brokaw or President Bush, people all along a letter’s path have become potential victims.
Since two postal workers who handle government mail in the nation’s capitol died earlier in the day, a new fear is evolving, that the anthrax threat may begin before the mail even arrives.
A sizzling flare, spits purple low across the pavement, and a police officer rhythmically waving his arms, greet buses and cars filled with postal workers arriving at the hospital. Many of the people walking towards the entrance are visibly shaken, some even angry.
“I’m just afraid,” said Sheila Butler, a postal worker at a facility that receives mail processed through Brentwood. “I think they should check whoever is dealing with the mail. á When [Daschle] first received his letter and they determined it was coming out of Brentwood, I think it should have been shut down.”
Many postal workers waiting outside don’t yet have the security blanket I do, a 60-day supply of Cipro that Capitol Physicians instructed me to take even though my nose swab test came back negative as expected.
“We’re giving anyone on the fifth floor of Hart 60 days [of Cipro],” the same doctor who did my initial test told me when I went to see the physicians again Sunday. “So do you want them?”
“Do I want them?” I had asked. “Uh, well you’re telling me I should, right?”
“You were in an area where people are being given 60 days of Cipro,” was his answer.
What do you say to that? “Yes. Of course I want them. Even though I was far across a balcony, and tested negative, I will accept the same dosage of Cipro as my friends who intern for Sen. Daschle and tested positive for anthrax exposure because they were right there when the letter was ripped open.”
I said, “Okay.” I didn’t know what else to do. And today, neither do these postal workers.
“We’re getting too many conflicting stories,” Butler said to me, shaking her head. “I’m really concerned.” A postal worker from Brentwood told me that today they’re basically just “playing catch up.”
“We don’t know how far it’s gone,” she said. “So today they’ve been gracious enough to provide us with transportation to be tested, and they’ve given us our pills that we take for the next 10 days.”
Ten days, for people potentially exposed in a facility where two workers died! Why am I taking 60? “When that first letter came through, they could have said okay, we’re going jump the gun, we’re going to test everybody,” the Brentwood worker said. But then she’d be taking 60 days worth of medication, like me, and wondering if it’s necessary.
I glance at the other reporters telling the story into their cameras and tape recorders. An ambulance screams by us. It looks, from a distance, like any other crime or accident scene, any other breaking news story. And I think for a moment, that I am not scared of anthrax. I am scared that the latest episode already feels routine.
