Five Additional People in Florida Test Positive for Anthrax
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: If you've been following the news on all the anthrax scares that have been coming out and spreading around the country, you know, the first of these cases came up out of Boca Raton, Florida. Two employees of American Media, Inc., a tabloid company, tabloid newspaper company in Florida, had a case where two employees did contract anthrax, one of whom actually did die. There are -- been also other reports possibly, saying that, perhaps that some other employees there may also have been exposed to the anthrax bacterium. Let's check in now with our medical news correspondent, Rhonda Roland, who has been tracking this particular new development down for us -- Rhonda.</s>RHONDA ROLAND, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Leon, as you just said, we are just hearing from the "New York Times" and Associated Press that there may be five additional people who have tested positive for anthrax antibodies in their blood. And I contacted the CDC, and they have said that those results are not final. That is, any other testing that is going on in Florida right now, the results are not final. And I think that we need to say that, with the past cases -- the first case, the second, the third -- that they've all been announced by health officials down in Florida. And none of this information, as we know yet, is coming from any health officials, either in Florida or from the CDC. So once again, we don't want to unduly alarm anyone until final results are in -- Leon.</s>HARRIS: Well, Rhonda, do we know how far they've gotten into the process of checking and testing every single employee? I believe there's something, about 1,000 employees there at that company.</s>ROLAND: Well, with the nasal swab test, which is really just seeing if people have been exposed, if they've been in the vicinity where the anthrax was. Believe that those tests, at least the first 700, were complete. The last 300, I think we're waiting for absolute final results on. And then we know that they were going to do some additional blood testing. And we were hearing that that was going to begin this week, and some of it would be done on a voluntary basis. So I think we just have to make it clear that this is a moving process here, a continual process. And when there may be something suspicious on one test, another test may be followed up. And just to put this in perspective with the case we heard of in Nevada, we heard about a positive test on a male sample, that it was negative, then a positive one. There are a lot of series of tests being done, and we need to wait for official results. The CDC is very clear, that when they have something positive, in order to protect the public's health, they will make that information available.</s>HARRIS: Rhonda Roland reporting on the telephone for us. We thank you very much. We can try to straighten out this some more with our Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who joins us once again here in the studio. You've been following this quite closely. What do you make of what's happened here? I mean, we were talking a while ago about the number of employees to be tested there, and the fact it might have been kind of surprising to think that they might be -- find this many cases in the last couple of people to be tested?</s>DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right. They talk about 965 people coming back negative as of yesterday. What preliminary -- preliminarily -- as we're hearing from Rhonda, five people have antibodies. Let me just clarify something about that. First of all, we don't know for sure that that's confirmed. But what that means is that there was an exposure at some point. Anybody who's been exposed to any sort of anthrax, really, may develop antibodies in their blood. We don't know when those exposures occurred. What we're talking about here, maybe, is people who work with animals, people who work in research labs, that may have had contact with anthrax. It's hard to pinpoint these five people and if, in fact, that this is true with the Florida case at this point, does not mean that they're infected. It only means that they have been exposed, and at some point in the past. These tests can be confusing. And it's not a perfect science. you have to do a lot of different tests. And as Rhonda just pointed out, we'll certainly hear for sure from the Centers for Disease Control when these have all been confirmed. A lot of these things are preliminary at this point.</s>HARRIS: OK. So in other words, don't believe it until you actually hear it from after we've heard it from the doctors.</s>GUPTA: That's right, ...</s>HARRIS: There you go.</s>GUPTA: ... that's right.</s>HARRIS: All right. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you very much for clearing that up, appreciate it. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com