Woman, 94, becomes fifth person killed by anthrax

War on Terrorism: Anthra

The bioterrorism riddle deepened on Wednesday with the death from inhaled anthrax of a largely housebound 94-year-old woman from a small town in Connecticut.

Ottilie Lundgren was admitted to hospital last Friday suffering from what doctors at first thought was pneumonia. However, tests then suggested anthrax. The diagnosis ­ baffling as it was ­ was confirmed by the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta.

How Ms Lundgren, who lived in Oxford, a town with one bank and no hotels about 75 miles (120km) north-east of New York, could have been exposed to the spores is unclear, although one possibility that emerged last night concerned a birthday card sent to Ms Lundgren by one of Connecticut's US senators, Chris Dodd. Minuscule amounts of anthrax were found in the Capitol Hill offices of Senator Dodd last month after a contaminated letter was sent to the leader of the Senate, Tom Daschle.

"It's very scary," said Ms Lundgren's neighbour Jodi McCue. "You would never have expected Oxford or a 94-year-old woman who stays at home all the time to ever have something like this happen."

Investigators have been similarly perplexed by the case of Kathy Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant and New York hospital worker, who died of inhaled anthrax on 31 October. There are no clues to how she contracted the disease.

Ms Lundgren became the fifth person to die from anthrax since early October; another 13 have been infected. The cases have otherwise been concentrated in New York City and Washington and have mostly involved government workers, politicians or members of the media.

Until yesterday, there had been no new victims identified for three weeks and the crisis had seemed to be on the wane. John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, recently indicated that he believed the culprit was an American.

Given her age, Ms Lundgren had stood little chance of fighting the infection. Dr Lydia Barakat said at the hospital: "Any elderly patient will have a hard time fighting any kind of infection, even the most common type of bacterial infection." John Rowland, the Governor of Connecticut, said more than 1,000 postal workers were being treated for anthrax as a precaution while the hunt for clues got under way.

Investigators face obstacles trying to trace the movements of both Ms Lundgren and Ms Nguyen before they died because both women lived alone. And each became too ill too quickly to give any useful details about themselves.

Also yesterday, officials revealed that tiny traces of anthrax had been found at the Education Department in Washington.

Officials said the results of tests were consistent with the findings in other mail rooms that received letters from the central Brentwood facility in Washington, which processes mail for the city.

Preliminary results from an analysis of another contaminated letter discovered last Friday addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, showed that it contained billions of spores of anthrax. About 10,000 spores or fewer can be enough to kill.