The development will allow researchers to better understand the anatomy of the deadly germ, and could uncover the trail of the perpetrators of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Publishing their findings Thursday on the website of the review Science, the researchers said they had isolated the same strain of anthrax used to contaminate mail in Boca Raton, Florida in late 2001, discovering that it is related to the most common strain of anthrax, the Ames strain.

The strain, in addition, can be traced to bacteria isolated in a cow in Texas in 1981. The bacteria from that discovery was sent to a US army laboratory at Fort Detrick, in the eastern state of Maryland, for study.

Specific attributes of the DNA of anthrax bacteria used in the Florida attack, show the "genetic fingerprints" of the bacteria, say scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland who led the study, working in collaboration with researchers from Arizona and Britain.

And they went on to detail their findings to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which is investigating attacks that used anthrax to target media and political personalities between October 5 and November 21.

Suspicions rest in the main on a number of scientists in the United States.

And genome sequencing of the bacteria used will allow researchers to recognize and identify the varieties, should a new anthrax attack occur in the United States or elsewhere, the researchers said.

Having a complete view of the bacteria's genome will also help scientists develop a vaccine and a rapid means to detect the infection, which can kill if not treated by antibiotics.

Comparing the genome of the bacteria found in Florida with that of the Ames strain -- decoded by a team of researchers in Porto Down, Britain through research that began in 1999 -- allowed them to identify 60 new genetic markers.

Those markers will be useful in distinguishing the origin of any future attacks or epidemics.

TIGR's lead researcher on anthrax Timothy Read predicts that at least 14 other strains or isolates of anthrax will be decoded in the coming year, in cooperation with the research center of the University of Arizona at Flagstaff.

The center has 1,200 isolates of the bacteria archived.

"Building a comprehensive database of information related to gene content ... and inversions in the genomes of important pathogens will allow investigators to quickly pinpoint the isolate that is most closely related to an outbreak strain," the scientists write in their paper.

Read and his team expect to publish the integral sequence of the anthrax bacillus genome in a scientific review by the end of 2002. "Such a database would greatly accelerate investigations and may deter future attacks," they add.

"The genomic sequence will boost the efforts to develop new vaccines, drugs and detection methods," the TIGR said.

It will also help make the anthrax bacteria "a model for how genomics can be used to study bacterial pathogens," according to Read.

Part of the genetic sequencing and other information on the anthrax bacteria are published on the institute's website at www.tigr.org. The Institute of Genomic Research, a non-profit organization, was founded in 1992. It sequenced the complete genome of the first living organism in 1995.

5,000 Other Letters Contaminated
The six anthrax-laced envelopes sent to US legislators and prominent media figures last year, killing five people, may have contaminated up to 5,000 other pieces of mail, according to a report Monday.

Report authors Glenn Webb, a mathematician at Vanderbilt University, and Martin Blaser, an expert in infectious diseases at New York University School of Medicine, called for a blanket vaccination program for all US mail handlers handlers to counter any further outbreaks.

"The original anthrax-laden letters may have 'cross contaminated' as many as 5,000 other pieces of mail," the authors warned.

"Given the magnitude of the problem, vaccination of all professional mail handlers may be advisable," they added.

Webb and Blaser teamed up to produce a mathematical model of how the deadly bacteria could have spread through the US mail system. The model and report are published in the May 14 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Because of the surprising amount of cross contamination involved, the greatest risk to society came from the exposures of postal workers and the recipients of cross-contaminated letters," they said.

All together, 22 people tested positive for anthrax last year in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The bacteria scare temporarily shut down lawmakers' offices and disrupted the US mail service.

Five people who contracted the more deadly inhalation form of the bacteria died: a photo editor in Florida, two postal employees, and two women with no apparent link to the contaminated letters.

"What is very striking is that only one of the deaths was the recipient of an original letter," says Webb. "The much greater danger is to postal workers and to the recipients of cross-contaminated letters. So the threat is much greater than what people believed earlier."

According to the report's authors, rapid and widespread application of antibiotics among postal workers and the people in the immediate environment where the original letters were received "probably averted a substantial number of additional infections."

Only four contaminated letters were ever discovered, but investigators believe at least two more have yet to be found.

With the model suggests that 5,000 recipients received cross-contaminated letters, it also implies that the contamination level "was so low" that the exposure only proved lethal in two cases: the two elderly women who were never linked to any original tainted envelope, the report said.

The elderly, the authors said, "are at substantially greater risk."

All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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