The United States needs to be better prepared for biological terror threats, officials said yesterday, but insisted the government had done its best to respond to the anthrax scare that has left three dead.
The warning came as a New Jersey postal worker was confirmed to have inhalation anthrax, the deadliest form of the disease. The middle-aged woman is employed as a mail handler at a main processing and distribution center near Trenton in Hamilton Township. Her condition is said to be "clinically improving".
Mr Mohammad Akhter, who heads the American Public Health Association, said the US response to the bioterror scare, which has left nearly a dozen others sick, was nonetheless marked by a "lack of co-ordination. "There are different people doing different things - intelligence agencies doing their work, the public health community doing their work, the government doing their work," he said in an interview with CBS news.
"There's not a single chain of command who decide which building to close, when to close it, who needs to be tested, how they need to be tested, who needs to get on what medications," he said.
Mr Akhter also said the government has not learned the necessary lessons from the deaths of two postal workers in Washington who authorities believe were infected with respiratory anthrax that leaked from a letter sent to the Senate Majority Leader, Mr Tom Daschle.
"I don't see any change from what happened in Washington, DC, if it happened in another community," he said. "I think we're still not organized, we are underprepared." But a postal official rebuffed criticism of the agency's handling of the chain of events that left the two postal workers dead before anyone thought to test them for exposure to the deadly bacteria.
The Deputy Postmaster General, Mr John Nolan, said he did not believe officials "let down" the postal workers, even though hundreds of congressional staff were tested and treated after an anthrax-laced letter was found in Congress.
"You've got entirely different situations," he said. "You had a clear and present danger in the Congress, because letters were opened and the dust came out. Once we saw that there was a potential problem in the health of our employees, we shut the facilities down immediately." Mr Nolan did say, however, that authorities would handle a new outbreak differently.
"Knowing now what we know now, we obviously would have done something different," he said. "We're taking that knowledge, frankly, and doing things differently every day today... But knowing what we knew then, knowing what the experts knew about anthrax, we thought we made the best judgments we could have."
But Senator John McCain, speaking on CNN, did call the handling of the anthrax situation in Washington "a mistake" due to the "appearance of a double standard (between postal and congressional staff)."