Outbreak may be over, says minister

The American homeland security director, Tom Ridge, said yesterday that he hoped the spate of anthrax outbreaks had now ended. "I am hopeful, like the rest of America, that the anthrax has stopped permanently," he said. "We certainly haven't seen or detected any new sources of anthrax."

However, the FBI has been forced to admit that, a month into its investigation into the anthrax mailings, it cannot answer basic questions such as how many laboratories were producing the bacteria.

During a series of exchanges with senators, James Caruso, deputy assistant director of the bureau's counter-terrorism division, said his agents were "pressing hard" for the answers to such questions but that information was hard to access. "The research capabilities of thousands of researchers is something that we're still trying to run down," he said. "I know it's an unsatisfactory answer and unsatisfying to us as well."

The embarrassing admission ­ not only that the FBI is no closer to identifying the people behind the mail, but that it cannot even say where in America it might have come from ­ was made as investigators continued to focus on the movements of a woman from New York who died from the disease. Kathy Nguyen, a hospital worker, is the only person not connected with the media, politics or the postal service to have been infected. The authorities believe she must have inhaled a large amount of anthrax spores, and they are using her Subway card to trace her steps during the final two weeks of her life.

Joseph Reznick, the city's deputy police chief, said: "We know what days she was at work. We know what hours she worked. We've seen phone records But absent those items, there's very little for us to go on. We're stumped right now."

It was also revealed yesterday that a postal worker who later died of anthrax had phoned the emergency services just hours earlier to reveal his fears of a possible infection. He criticised the authorities for failing to keep him and other workers at the Brentwood facility in Washington informed of developments.