WashPost

Friday, November 2, 2001; Page A28

OFFICIALS ARE scrambling to determine how Kathy Nguyen was exposed to the deadly anthrax spores that killed her this week. They worry because there is no obvious connection to the factors common to earlier anthrax exposures and deaths: no clear link to the mail or to the media. Her death could signal a new front in the attacks or reveal another weakness in authorities' understanding of how this microorganism is operating. So they have launched into the detective work that's become all too familiar in recent days: tracing her movements, interviewing co-workers, swabbing her workplace for anthrax spores. The drumbeat of developments is riveting, but there's a danger that the emerging routine of briefings and test results will obscure something fundamental to these attacks, as to those of Sept. 11: the heinous nature of this assault on the innocent.

These are the victims of this unsigned attack: Ms. Nguyen, a quiet 61-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, riding the subway each day to and from her job in a hospital stockroom, bringing cheer to her neighbors with a smile and a greeting. Robert Stevens, a newspaper photo editor and avid fisherman. Thomas Morris Jr., a 28-year veteran of the postal service who loved to bowl. Joseph Curseen Jr., the president of his neighborhood civic association, who never once called in sick during 15 years at the post office. Like the waiters in the World Trade Center and the file clerks in the Pentagon and the fathers on the hijacked jets: hard-working, decent, ordinary citizens going about their business, never expecting they were in harm's way.

While the United States pursues its campaign against the international terrorist network it holds responsible for the slaughter of Sept. 11, authorities can't begin to say who is to blame for unleashing the deadly anthrax spores. But the nature of the attackers is clear even if their identity is not. They have let loose a horror from which nations have recoiled; they have crossed into territory that despicable figures in history hesitated to occupy. The drive to bring them to justice must be as relentless as their crime is unfathomable.

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2001

Answers

In a crowded subway station or a sidewalk, she could have stood next to the person who mailed the letters, and he/she was covered with the anthrax bt not affected because the person was taking antibiotics.

It really could be so simple, and yet so hard to find out.

Poor woman. To die not knowing. And yet, she may be the lucky one.

-- Anonymous, November 02, 2001