Samples of the substance found in a Las Vegas motel room last week after its occupant was hospitalized with breathing difficulties will be analyzed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the FBI's Hazardous Materials Response Unit, officials told United Press International Monday.

Two CDC specialists were already in Las Vegas at the request of state and local authorities, the agency's spokesman Von Roebuck told UPI. He said they were working to help ascertain what had sickened Roger Von Bergendorff, a resident at the Extended Stay America motel who was hospitalized Feb. 14 and remains in critical condition.

Experts say that with no conclusive analysis of either the substance or the patient it is hard to tell what might have been found in Bergendorff's room, and some accuse local officials -- and the news media -- of getting out ahead of the story.

"There are field tests, but the lab testing will eliminate the possibility of a false positive," FBI spokesman Richard Kolko acknowledged.

Roebuck told UPI the agency's lab had received samples for confirmatory testing Monday but could not say when the results would be available.

Ramon Denby, a spokesman for the Las Vegas police who recovered the substance after it was handed to the motel management, told UPI a hazmat unit called the Armor Team had conducted field tests on the substance and determined that it contained ricin.

He said the tests had been "conclusively confirmed" by a U.S. military lab. "It was 100 percent positive for ricin," he said.

But a spokeswoman for the Nevada National Guard's 92nd Civilian Support Team who carried out the second set of tests told UPI the results were only preliminary and operated on the precautionary principle.

"The mobile lab rolls in when requested by law enforcement," Capt. April Conway said. "Their job is to take the first cut on what (any substance found) is. They tell the first responders, 'We think you're dealing with ricin,' or whatever it is. �� The aim is to protect first responders."

Experts say field testing only reveals the presence of ricin, a protein derived from castor beans that in its purest form is highly toxic.

"You can grind castor beans into powder, and that will contain a tiny amount of ricin," said George Smith, specialist in protein chemistry and a senior fellow with the think tank GlobalSecurity.org.

He said the quantities involved, less than 1 percent of the powder, would be far too small to be usable as a poison but large enough to register in field tests.

Smith said this was what happened in the Wood Green ricin case, made famous by Powell's presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, when he linked it with a training camp allegedly run in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But, as evidence at the Wood Green trial later revealed, the initial reports about the presence of ricin in the apartment British police raided Jan. 5 turned out to be wrong.

"Subsequent confirmatory tests on the material from the pestle and mortar did not detect the presence of ricin. It is my opinion therefore that toxins are not detectable in the pestle and mortar," wrote Martin Pearce, leader of the Biological Weapon Identification Group at the British military research lab at Porton Down.

To eliminate the possibility of false positives and determine the purity of the sample takes laboratory testing, Smith said.

Other experts agreed that it was too soon to say how dangerous was the substance Bergendorff was apparently trying to make -- The New York Times reported authorities had also found castor beans and "a book about anarchy tabbed to a page explaining how to manufacture ricin."

"We need a proper lab analysis of the substance and a proper medical analysis of the patient and we don't have either of them," commented Milton Leitenberg, a bio-weapons specialist at the University of Maryland.

"We don't really know anything at this point," said Leitenberg, adding he was surprised by some of comments he had seen from local officials and some of the media coverage.

"The information out there seems largely inaccurate," he said.

Smith said many media reports were citing CDC figures that as little as 500 micrograms of the pure toxin -- a dose about the size of a pinhead -- can be fatal, without mentioning the difficulty in manufacturing to that level of purity.

Smith said the kind of recipes for ricin typically found in anarchist books or Internet publications could not produce anything that was really useable, even as a poison against individuals.

He said the kind of processing they recommended "actually reduces the amount of ricin present" in the powder.

"There is no practical way to get the required quantities into the victim," he said of the homemade castor bean paste that would result.

"There are laboratory procedures you can perform that will produce pure ricin, but none of these kinds of recipes do that," Smith said, adding, "You have to have some level of technical expertise. Not someone who was good at chemistry at high school. Not even someone with a bachelor's degree in chemistry."

Lawrence Sands, chief health officer of the Southern Nevada Health District, said his agency was working with the CDC and others to identify samples that could help establish whether Bergendorff had been exposed to ricin.

"We have been consulting with doctors (at the hospital) to identify the type of specimens required for testing," he said, adding that could include samples from personal effects or clothing as well as clinical samples.

The long period of time Bergendorff had been hospitalized also "presents some difficulties," Sands said. Any ricin he had been exposed to "might have been metabolized out" by this time.

As it stood, he added, there was no evidence that Bergendorff had been exposed. "Acute respiratory distress (like Bergendorff's) is a common presentation at ER," he said.

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