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The all-clear has been sounded at the United States embassy visa office in Rome, which had been closed to visitors since Monday after an envelope received there was found to contain an unidentified white powder, sparking a security alert.

The apparent anthrax hoax is the latest in a flurry of white-powder alarms across the world since the war in Iraq started, with national security agencies on heightened alert for retaliatory terrorist attacks and worries about how effective their defenses would be should any of them turn out to be the real thing. The envelope opened by an employee in the consular visa office in Rome was handwritten and postmarked from another country in Europe, a U.S. official told TIME on Tuesday.

Authorities were alerted and a special Rome firefighter unit immediately sealed off the room. The substance was sent to a laboratory in southern Italy for analysis. Some would-be foreign travelers to the United States were temporarily stranded.

The embassy on Rome's historic Via Veneto has been under heightened security since the beginning of the war in Iraq, with added police and steel barriers set up around the perimeter. Public opinion in Italy is strongly opposed to the U.S.-led conflict in Iraq, though the country's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is counted as one of the strongest European allies in the war effort. Similar scares have been reported in Brunei, Borneo and Slovakia, at an RAF base in Britain, and last week at La Guardia airport. In all cases the substances have proved to be innocuous. But in the present atmosphere more alerts are expected.

Nowhere is there more caution than in the U.S. where Defense Department officals this week warned citizens not to send unsolicited mail to troops in the Gulf on account of the possibility of anthrax getting through. The recommended method of contact is through military e-mail sites. More alarming still for citizens of the U.S., the only country to have suffered a real anthrax attack in 2001, was research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warning that despite having the best detection equipment and response procedures, an airborne attack could cause more than 120,000 deaths in a metropolitan area with a population of about 13 million.

Furthermore, reports out of Washington, based on papers seized during the recent capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in Rawalpindi suggest that al-Qaeda is close to having the capacity to produce anthrax and other biological agents. Real or not, bio-chemical terrorism is leaving its mark.

• JEFF ISRAELY | ROME
• White powder worries continue around the world