Newspaper woman ‘is seventh anthrax victim’

A New York Post employee has contracted skin anthrax, a television station affiliated with the newspaper reported today.

The woman had been tested with 10 other staff considered at high risk but the first test came up negative because she was on antibiotics for an unrelated illness, WNYW-TV reported.

The publisher’s statement said the victim was ‘‘already regarded as cured’’.

It is the fourth anthrax case in New York City, all involving media companies, and the seventh nationwide in the weeks since the September 11 terrorist attacks. One man in Florida has died.

The woman, whose name was not made public, works at the News Corp building in midtown Manhattan. WNYW said no other cases have been found at the building, which also is the headquarters for Fox News.

The Fox television station and the newspaper are owned by News Corp, a worldwide media organiSation headed by Rupert Murdoch.

Post spokeswoman Suzanne Halpin said she could not confirm the report. A call to the office of Post Publisher Ken Chandler was referred to a different corporate spokesman, who did not immediately return a call for comment.

WNYW said it was not known how the employee came into contact with the anthrax. The building was one of several media headquarters in Manhattan checked by police and the Health Department for the presence of anthrax over the past week.

Experts are conducting environmental tests and a criminal investigation is under way at the CBS Broadcast Centre, where a woman who works in anchorman Dan Rather’s office was diagnosed with the skin form of anthrax.

The CBS employee, Claire Fletcher, 27, is being treated but has continued to work, and network officials said Thursday she feels fine.

The source of the bacteria was still being sought, but city Health Commissioner Neal Cohen said ‘‘it makes sense’’ to suspect that it was delivered in an envelope.

Cohen noted that Fletcher works with mail and her case resembles an anthrax infection at NBC headquarters in New York.

Meanwhile, police at the US Capitol in Washington declared two anthrax-tainted Senate office buildings off-limits today in preparation for environmental testing.

Hundreds of congressional employees awaited results of tests for exposure to the spores.

As federal investigators struggled to trace the origin of anthrax-tainted letters, administration officials said they still had no evidence of a connection between the bioterrorism and the September 11 suicide hijackings that killed more than 5,000 people in New York and Washington.

‘‘I do not have knowledge of a direct link of the anthrax incidents to the enemy, but I wouldn’t put it past them,’’ President George Bush said in China.

Those officially diagnosed with anthrax in the past two weeks include a woman postal worker whose office in West Trenton, New Jersey, processed tainted letters sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and NBC television anchorman Tom Brokaw were processed.

In Washington, police issued orders saying that ‘‘no member, staff member or congressional employee will be permitted to enter’’ the Dirksen or Hart Senate office buildings without personal protection gear.

Anthrax has been discovered in both buildings, in a mail facility in the Dirksen building and in Daschle’s office in the Hart building.

One congressional source said another 1,300 people showed no sign of exposure in tests completed overnight. Hundreds more awaited their results.

Thirty-one people tested positive for exposure to anthrax earlier this week after powdery substance fell from mail opened in Daschle’s office.

They included 23 aides to the majority leader, five police officers and three people on the staff of Senator Russ Feingold, who occupies the office next to Daschle’s.

Apart from the New Jersey letter carrier, officials said they believed that a maintenance worker who serviced mail-sorting machines at the Trenton post office’s regional distribution center in Hamilton, New Jersey has anthrax.

As reports of new anthrax exposures came in, Bush administration officials tried to assure a jittery nation that authorities were on the alert for terrorist acts.

‘‘Our antennae are up for all conceivable risks,’’ said Tom Ridge, the new chief of domestic security. While saying there was no specific threat, the government notified doctors nationwide that they should watch for possible cases of smallpox, food poisoning and deadly viruses like Ebola.

Surgeon General David Satcher said stockpiles of antibiotics were sufficient to respond to the anthrax threat.