(2 of 6)
Yet no matter what the final, definitive tests show, it is striking how many of these attacks--real and false--were directed at media companies. Having attacked America's financial and military centers on Sept. 11, the al-Qaeda terror network might well be tempted to hit the nation's media--which manage to embody both freedom and excess. Is al-Qaeda trying to panic U.S. journalists into doing the terrorists' work for them, spreading the fear that has now hit them where they work? Addressing the possibility that the anthrax scare is a follow-up to the attack on the World Trade Center, Vice President Dick Cheney wondered aloud, "Are they related? We don't know. We don't have enough evidence to be able to pin down that kind of connection. But...we have to be suspicious."
If this was a coordinated terrorist assault, though, it was pretty ineffectual. Given anthrax's lethal potential, an assault that caused one death, one nonfatal infection and two noninfectious exposures (a number that had risen to seven by Saturday, said American Media, though federal health officials wouldn't confirm it) is like the Sept. 11 hijackers' commandeering a motorcycle and driving it into a telephone booth. "Get real," says a photographer who works for tabloid newspapers. "If this was a terrorist incident, they would have put it in the ventilating system, and 400 people would have anthrax right now."
Not everyone is taking the matter so casually. The public, sensitized to the horrors of bioterrorism by weeks of government warnings and media coverage, was ready to assume the worst. Even though a mass attack is considered unlikely, doctors in South Florida and New York have been besieged with demands for ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, the only antibiotic specifically approved for treating anthrax. Police all over the U.S. have been fielding calls reporting suspicious substances; on Friday a single precinct in New York City responded to three different alerts, quarantining one building in lower Manhattan for two hours. The city's emergency rooms were besieged as well. "There's a lot of anxiety," reports Dr. Marc Stoller of the city's Beth Israel Medical Center.
Since two of the Florida victims worked in American Media's mailroom, postal workers who sorted and delivered the company's mail have also been tested, and Postal Service employees are demanding blanket testing for everyone in the Boca Raton-area post offices. Mail clerks in half a dozen other cities with anthrax scares were also tested, and media outlets--including TIME--temporarily shut down mailrooms while they scrambled to beef up security. The Postal Service has issued new guidelines on how to do that (examples: don't open any mail on which the postmark and return address don't match; don't open unexpected mail from someone you don't know, especially if the address is handwritten). The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control, meanwhile, are trying to get a handle on the scope of the problem and beginning the painstaking detective work that could pin down the source--or sources--of the bugs used in the attacks.