Oct 10, 2001 Hazmat and police evacuated a floor and took a woman for medical evaluation after she opened an envelope with some gritty material in it at the technical college she worked for. A number of other employees in the area were also given antibiotics and sent home.

-- Paul (skypilot99@aol.com), October 10, 2001

Answers

Thanks, Paul. Very typical item.

There are so very many of these calls coming in EVERYWHERE across the U.S. it's almost not worth posting them here. Only a tiny fraction make the newspapers.

So far they are all false alarms...the concern and the resulting phone call are understandable, sometimes, but still no credible threats have emerged.

It's amazing how much inadvertant junk apparently gets sent through the mail...and some of it may be deliberate hoax copycats, I guess, and sometimes legitimate "free samples" from a legitimate company get pulverized in the mail and then the recipient panics. After Florida, it's all coming "out of the woodwork."

Sorting these out is time-consuming. The labs are working hard to test lots of stuff, but it's all negative for any pathogens...so far, anyhow.

If something real happens, then it's a whole different story of course.

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), October 11, 2001.

OK, *now* it's a whole different story. (Noon Friday 12 October.) See breaking news about case in NY City.

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), October 12, 2001.