Chinese university victim of new anthrax scare
2001-10-23

Nations China City Guangzhou States Guangdong People Jiang Zemin Event 2001 Anthrax Attack

BEIJING - A Chinese university has disinfected a dormitory room and prescribed antibiotics to student residents after a letter from the United States triggered an anthrax scare, officials and students said on Monday.

But people at Zhongshan University in the southeastern city of Guangzhou were treating Sunday's incident as a false alarm after the male undergraduates showed no signs of infection from the potentially lethal germ.

"The student dorm did receive mail from the United States containing some white powder yesterday afternoon," a spokesman for Zhongshan University in southern city of Guangzhou said.

"But the students do not seem to be infected," he told Reuters.

He did not know the letter's origins and students living at the dormitory were not reachable for comment.

The dormitory remained open and the students have returned to the disinfected room, according to the director of the school's hospital.

"After we received the report last night we immediately disinfected the room. It's not sealed off," she told Reuters.

"The students appeared to be all right upon examination so we gave them some medicine and let them go."

An official at the Guangzhou Health and Quarantine Station said they took a sample of the white powder last night.

"The soonest the results could come out is the day after tomorrow," he said.

Other students on campus have played down the incident.

"Everything's quiet," said one male undergraduate living in a nearby dormitory.

The letter was the third China is known to have probed since a rash of anthrax scares in the United States following the September 11 hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington which killed more than 5,000 people.

Last week, China said it was probing the suspicious contents of two letters, but tests appear to be still under way.

"We have no results to this point," a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said.

One of the letters China was investigating, sent to a Chinese employee of a U.S. firm in China, contained a leaflet of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, China has said.

But the group's New York-based information centre said the government was using the global anthrax scare to smear Falun Gong and divert human rights pressure from President Jiang Zemin during an Asia-Pacific summit in Shanghai that ended on Sunday.

Last week, China banned any white powder from being sent through the mail and ordered post office workers to tighten checks of all parcels and letters.

A State Post Bureau circular also banned mailing "goods that it is difficult to determine the nature of" and called for intensified checks for explosives, drugs and strong poisons, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

China's checks would be especially strict on items coming from "countries with higher anthrax dangers," state television said without elaboration.