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Justice in Jasper
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______ Russian roulette BY JEFF STEIN | When an abortion clinic in Milwaukee received an anonymous letter purportedly containing the deadly toxin anthrax two weeks ago, the city's downtown was tied up in knots for several hours. Blocks surrounding the building were cordoned off while ambulances, fire trucks and special emergency teams flooded the area. The Summit Women's Center was evacuated and hundreds of workers in nearby businesses were ordered to stay inside their offices for several hours -- an exercise that probably cost the city $100,000. The letter was eventually determined to be a hoax, like scores of similar cases over the past few months. Anthrax threats have been made against many women's clinics and government buildings and even a train as it passed through Montana, according to Milwaukee Deputy Fire Chief Don Doro. Luckily, said Doro, the test used to evaluate the threat letters was "99.9 percent accurate." Members of Milwaukee's Hazardous Materials Team, however, tell a different story. They say the field test they used to determine whether anthrax was really in the envelope was, in fact, a bust. The problem, according to Jim Martins, Milwaukee's Special Teams Coordinator, was that the hand-held device reacted as positively to the suspected anthrax as it did to a non-infected control substance -- a false positive. "What we got from that didn't help us decide which way to go," Martins said. The HAZMAT team has since learned that they weren't the only ones having problems with the test. "The Army told us it was useless," explained one team member. A government biologist, who asked not to be identified, agreed: "It works only 50 percent of the time, and that's not good enough." Joseph Tartal, a spokesman for New Horizons Diagnostics, which manufactures the test, defended its reliability and said, "If there is any problem we're not going to ignore it. We want to face it front and center and deal with whatever might be going on, because we're a dedicated company producing a high-quality product." He said he'd already talked to the Milwaukee HAZMAT team, who told him "they had read the test wrong and determined the results incorrectly." But Barry Babler, the FBI spokesman in Milwaukee, disagreed. "The talk I heard down on the street among the HAZMAT members was that not everyone was real satisfied with the reliability," Babler said. "It was explained that you can get false positives. So that's a problem." "The situation is not a secret" at FBI headquarters, Babler added, "or at least it shouldn't be." A senior FBI official, asked about the test's reliability, demanded anonymity before commenting, "You won't get me to say that, but I won't deny it." New Horizons sells its "Smart Test" kit to "about 50 federal, state and local agencies," a company official said. Five hundred units were shipped in the last six months. The kit, which costs about $50, is discarded after each use, the official said. The wafer-thin, one-by-three-inch device works somewhat like a pregnancy test. If anthrax or any of four other pathogens are present in the sample, one window will turn some degree of red. One problem with the device, said analysts familiar with it, is that there's usually not an easily discernible difference in color shades between the control window and the test window after the test has been run. "When you get into differentiating between shades of pink and red, this can be a difficulty," Milwaukee's Jim Martins said.
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