Virus of fear infects US

ROGER FRANKLIN reports on how Americans are discovering 'viruses' everywhere.

So did you hear about the biological "incident" in Cincinnati? Or what about the "white rain" that drove residents of tiny Trappe, Maryland, to take shelter in their homes, seal the windows and, if they happened to be of a religious bent, say some very serious prayers?

And how about that "sophisticated black box" that a bomb-disposal cop in Washington DC spent an anxious hour dismantling beside the car under which it was found?

No? Well, that's hardly surprising given the many hundreds of purported outbreaks of germ warfare that kept an alarmed and anxious nation looking over its shoulder this week.

From Washington, where the State Department and Internal Revenue Service were hastily evacuated after mysterious white powder was found in their respective mail rooms, to Monterey, California, where employees at internet outfit Quickstart fled their cubicles in fear of the poison racin, an already shaken America found itself gripped by a low-grade outbreak of fevered panic.

A garden-variety lunatic with a jar of scented cleaning fluid threw the Washington subway system into turmoil. The town hall in Portland, Oregon, was cleared when a public servant found an envelope on his desk and divined that it contained a dose of a lethal dust. The Federal Building in St Paul, Minnesota, and the Ford Motor Company's consumer-finance head office in Detroit were victims of similar scares, as was the Empire State Building.

All these incidents and more occurred - or didn't occur - in the course of a single afternoon.

Given what was happening at the Florida headquarters of American Media, the company that produces the Elvis-Spotted-On-Mars supermarket tabloids, the twitchiness was understandable.

"An all-but-certain terrorist attack," was the way one of the less circumspect local politicians described the otherwise inexplicable cases of anthrax poisoning that killed a 63-year-old photo editor, almost carried off one of his workmates and contaminated at least one other of the company's 600-odd employees.

The Florida alarm was genuine, the sole confirmed biological incident to emerge so far in the wake of the mass murders that levelled the World Trade Center, destroyed part of the Pentagon, brought down a jet in Pennsylvania and claimed what the latest tallies put at about 6000 innocent lives.

But those other cases? Well, they ranged from the erroneously alarming to the patently absurd.

Take the drama in Cincinnati, for example, which began when a man and woman described as being of "Middle Eastern appearance" were observed talking quietly and intently at a booth in a local diner.

When they left, the waitress found a small vial of unmarked brownish liquid among the crumpled napkins and called her boss, who summoned all the other employees, who gazed long and hard at the little bottle and wondered what to do.

It was then that a kitchen worker stepped forward, unscrewed the top and took a tentative swig to learn, as he later explained it, just what the fluid tasted like. Informed by a horrified co-worker that he might drop dead at any moment, the human guinea pig began to hyperventilate and lapsed into babbling, blubbering incoherence.

By the time a bio-hazard team arrived, he had broken out in hives and was suffering from incontinence.

A deadly toxin? Not at all. While the men in the moon suits vacuumed the floor for lethal spores, the couple returned to ask if anyone had found their little bottle. By late in the week, though details were still fuzzy, the word was that the self-appointed human guinea pig had sampled a vial of urine the woman had tested to determine if she was pregnant.

If he was recovering from his psychosomatic symptoms when the diagnosis reached him, the good news no doubt inspired a renewed bout of nausea.

God only knows, America could do with a good laugh right now - one reason, perhaps, why comedy flicks are doing boffo business at movie theatres from coast to coast.

Trouble is, in real life and no matter how hard America tries to find the spot on its funny bone that reacts to gallows humour, anxiety is smothering mirth.

The following breakfast exchange, overheard at the Malibu Diner on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, is atypical only in that it was somewhat louder than the quiet, worried tones in which the subject is being raised in offices, bars and ballparks: "You know," said the middle-aged woman in the too-tight tweed suit, "you know that anthrax in the subway would spread everywhere".

"Or they could just throw it off the Chrysler Building," answered her younger companion, pausing before delivering the punch line "if those maniacs don't crash a plane into it first".

No chortles, just a worried silence before their conversation resumed on a less unsettling tack.

It is the same with some of the other absurdities being reported across the country - something this reporter discovered when he called an old friend and former workmate who now labours as a senior editor at the anthrax-infected National Inquirer in Florida.

Having just buried a workmate, had his nose swabbed for anthrax spores, been prescribed a dose of preventive antibiotics and then been obliged to pull an all-nighter in order to produce next week's edition from a thrown-together newsroom in Miami, he seemed like a certain candidate for cheering up.

Had he heard about the white stuff that fell out of the sky over Trappe? No, he had not. Well, it was nothing more poisonous than bird droppings.

There was an abbreviated, awkward chuckle on the other end of the line - one that didn't gain any strength when the truth about that black box in Washington was revealed.

Far from being a bomb, it was but a simple car-tracking device installed by a private detective so that a jealous husband could follow the movements of his straying wife.

Then came the question that had to be asked: "So how are you doing. Have you heard the results of your anthrax swab? Have you been exposed?"

No, he replied, he hadn't heard if he was positive or negative, so he was taking his pills and burying himself in his work. It was a great comfort, he said, to have something that kept his mind off the grim possibilities.

And the wife and the children, how were they bearing up? It was the question that shattered the former Fleet Streeter's unflappable facade.

"I kept an old cardigan on my chair, you know, for when the air conditioning was turned up too high," he began. "But the thing is," he continued, voice quavering, "I've been thinking a lot and - God help me, Jesus - I wore it home and the kids, they hugged me in it, and what will I do if they get sick?"

And then, no longer able to choke out the words, this man who has covered soccer riots and the bombs of Belfast bawled uncontrollably.

"If they show the symptoms, they say it's too late to be cured," he said at last.

No cure, either, for the virus of fear.

Full coverage: Terror in America

Pictures: Day 1 | Day 2 | Brooklyn Bridge live webcam