U.S. officials said yesterday that a letter mailed in Pakistan to a U.S. consulate in the city of Lahore has tested positive for anthrax bacteria, providing possible evidence that the anthrax outbreak in the United States is of international rather than domestic origin.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said preliminary testing in Pakistan indicated that the letter contained anthrax spores. Samples from the tainted letter arrived Sunday in the United States for further testing by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., he said. Results of the Fort Detrick tests have not been announced.
The letter came to the consulate on Oct. 31 "in the public local mail," Boucher said. "They had an off-site mailroom facility, and it was checked, bagged, isolated there, and then sent on to us for further testing."
The Lahore letter is the first piece of contaminated mail received at a U.S. consulate that has not come via diplomatic pouch from the United States.
If the positive test is confirmed and the Pakistani bacteria are similar to spores mailed in the United States, the letter could provide evidence that the U.S. anthrax outbreak has international origins. Investigators have said repeatedly that they do not know whether the bacteria have been spread by domestic extremists or by international terrorists linked to the Sept. 11 attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Boucher cautioned Monday that many "preliminary positives" for anthrax later have turned out to be negative. And even if additional testing confirms that the Pakistani letter contained B. anthracis , the bacteria that cause anthrax, that does not mean that the spores are necessarily the same as those mailed in the United States.
In the last known incident of attempted anthrax terrorism in Asia -- an attack perpetrated in Japan by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in the early 1990s -- no one grew ill. Genetic analysis showed that the Aum Shinrikyo spores belonged to the Sterne strain, a weakened type of bacteria used as a veterinary vaccine. It stimulates immunity but does not cause disease.
Boucher said yesterday that a diplomatic mail pouch received at the American consulate in Yekaterinburg had tested positive for a "negligible" amount of anthrax bacteria. Similar contamination of U.S. diplomatic mail has been detected in Lima, Peru, and Vilnius, Lithuania, as well as at a State Department sorting facility in Sterling, Va.
There have been 17 confirmed cases of anthrax in the United States, including four deaths, since the beginning of October, all but one of them attributed to the handling of tainted mail.
On Capitol Hill yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said plans to fumigate the entire Hart Senate Office Building had been abandoned in favor of a four-step process to eliminate anthrax spores through foam cleaning, testing and some fumigation.
Daschle said the Environmental Protection Agency would use chlorine dioxide gas to sterilize his Hart office and that of his neighbor, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.). The Hart Building was closed Oct. 19 after a mail handler in Daschle's office opened a letter containing anthrax spores in a powder that quickly spread through the air.
Daschle said the EPA also planned to use chlorine dioxide to fumigate the heating, air-conditioning and ventilation system. "Hot spots" will be scrubbed with special cleansing foam, a process that began Monday with the washing down of a contaminated freight elevator and stairwell, he said.
Finally, Daschle told reporters, each of the 50 Senate offices in the Hart Building will be "spot-tested" to ensure there is no further contamination. He said senators would not be able to move back in until Nov. 21 at the earliest. "Safety must come before convenience," Daschle said later on the Senate floor.
The EPA last week recommended using chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleaching agent that has been shown to be effective in killing bacteria in lab tests. But Daschle said the EPA has decided that "there are too many dangers inherent with using gas throughout the entire complex." The EPA had no comment on his remarks.
In New York, a postal workers' union asked a federal judge to issue a court order to shut down and clean up the city's main mail sorting facility, charging that the Postal Service responded inadequately after anthrax microbes were detected on five sorting machines Oct. 25.
"All they were concerned about was moving the mail," William M. Smith, head of New York's Metro Area Postal Union, told Judge John F. Keenen.
Federal lawyers say the sprawling Morgan Distribution and Processing Facility is safe for postal workers and will stay open, a position supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The judge is not expected to rule on the case before Friday.
A State Department spokesman said a Pakistani employee opened the Lahore letter as part of the consulate's local mail delivery on Oct. 31. The envelope was light blue and bore a Pakistani stamp, the spokesman said. The address was written in English, and there was no return address.
The employee, wearing gloves and a mask, opened the letter and noticed a paper inside folded over a white powder. He closed the envelope immediately and reported his discovery, the spokesman said.
The consulate sent the envelope to a local laboratory, where it tested positive for anthrax bacteria, the spokesman said. It was then sent to Fort Detrick. The spokesman said it was not yet known whether the paper inside the envelope was a letter.
Pakistani authorities say they had confirmed three cases of anthrax contamination in Pakistan before the Lahore letter, including an Oct. 23 letter to the Karachi newsroom of the Daily Jang, an Urdu-language newspaper.
Correspondent Peter Baker in Moscow, special correspondent Colum Lynch in New York and staff writer Rick Weiss contributed to this article. 
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