The Washington Post

WASHINGTON Tests revealed the presence of anthrax spores in four more government buildings in downtown Washington yesterday, and officials said a New Jersey woman who does not work in a mailroom has contracted the skin form of the disease.

In another sign of the contamination spreading from the District of Columbia"s central postal processing plant to other mail facilities, tests found traces of anthrax spores in mailrooms at the Supreme Court building, the State Department and at a federal building in Southwest where the Department of Health and Human Services and Voice of America have offices.

Similar traces were found at a nearby building used by the Food and Drug Administration, which joins a list of more than 20 sites in Washington where the bacteria have been detected. Officials also announced that anthrax spores were found in a mail pouch at the U.S. Embassy in Lima, Peru, which receives correspondence through the contaminated State Department mail center in Sterling, Va.

But for federal health investigators, the new anthrax case in New Jersey seemed to be the day"s most important development. Although the skin form of anthrax is not life-threatening and the unidentified woman is recovering, she may be the first person to be infected by ordinary mail delivered to a home or business.

The woman, a 51-year-old bookkeeper who had a lesion on her forehead, works in Hamilton Township, N.J., near the mail processing building that handled the bacteria-filled letters mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and the New York Post. Until now, anthrax infections had occurred only among people working in the mail-delivery system or those who opened the tainted letters, and health authorities had said the chance of a postal customer getting the disease from cross-contaminated mail was very unlikely.

Officials have launched environmental tests at the woman"s office and home.

"There"s no operating theory right now for how she got infected," said George DiFerdinando, New Jersey"s health commissioner. "The people who work near her will obviously be concerned, and environmental testing will tell us a whole lot more."

The announcement came two hours after officials with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told District health officials that they are reconsidering whether it is necessary to conduct environmental testing of mailrooms in as many as 4,000 private organizations in the Washington area that receive unsorted mail from the central District processing plant on Brentwood Road NE.

CDC officials also said they were rethinking their recommendation that employees in those workplaces start taking antibiotics, explaining that information available yesterday would help them reach a decision.

D.C. and federal officials said they have a list of the 4,000 organizations but do not plan to release it until they have finished assessing the health risks to the workers.

District health officials said they took comfort in the fact that of the private firms that have performed environmental testing in their mailrooms, none has reported positive results. They acknowledged, however, that they did not have information on how those tests were conducted. Maryland officials are running similar tests at 22 private mail facilities, and they said results on the four tests that have come back were negative.

The new positive test results on downtown federal buildings bring to about 20 the number of contaminated sites in the Washington area.

Because of the anthrax spores found in the basement mailroom of the Supreme Court, the building will remain closed at least through Tuesday. As it was, the court conducted business outside its own courthouse Monday for the first time in 66 years because of a positive test last week at a remote Supreme Court mail facility.

Health officials said the nine justices are taking antibiotics. The court declined comment.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Lima said anthrax was on the interior of a canvas mailbag. None of the letters or packages inside were opened, which the spokesman said suggested that the mail picked up the anthrax spores through incidental contact"" as it passed through the State Department mailroom in Washington.

Fern Finley, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Government Employees, said she heard from several nervous State Department workers Monday. People are concerned that even though the department is doing what they think is best, they don"t know whether this is enough. There"s the worry that they don"t really know what to do. It"s very unsettling.""

In South Florida and New York, postal unions filed lawsuits charging that the U.S. Postal Service has been dragging its feet in efforts to protect employees.