Why don’t we start passing the mail and all packages under a radioactive source, like many companies in the food and drug industry do, to assure sterility? It might be expensive, but it might seriously crack down on the Anthrax “nuts” (copy cats, etc.)
Better safe than sorry,
i’m not wild about my mail glowing in the dark… and what if the radiation melts the edible underwear i ordered from the Adam & Eve collection…
You’d be surprised what undergoes some form of radiation exposure as part of the packaging process…
As usual, I don’t have any cites, nor did I double check my facts, but here goes nothing:
UV lamps should kill the anthrax on the surface without rendering the packages radioactive in any way. However, the lamps would do nothing for the contents. Alpha particle radiation also wouldn’t penetrate. It seems to me you would need gamma (possibly beta) to knock out the bacteria inside. Those would cause a whole range of safety concerns. There are some procedures for irradiated beef, but if I recall correctly, those also just address surface bacteria.
I’ve toured pharmaceutical facilities, and I know the packages are irradiated (a funny word) prior to final distribution - although prepared in a sterile environment. I WAG it’d be no great leap to assume this could work for the US mail.
Hey, “Beeblebrox”, your “handle” doesn’t refer to a specific episode of a relatively recent Disney cartoon series, does it? If yes…awesome!
“DTZ! I just want to get home to Beeblebrox…!”
It’s an interesting idea, but it would mean a problem sending live plants and seeds through the mail.
Of course, if there was a serious threat, then it might be worth putting the seed companies out of business in order to save lives.
I’m not an expert, but from what I’ve heard, Anthrax in its dormant spore state is very hardy. I doubt there would be any feasible way to implement your idea. I think there are something like 680 million pieces of mail handled daily – you’d have to really slow things down to even attempt the type of thing you are suggesting.
I can see it now: we give each and every post office a powerful radioactive source to kill the anthrax spores that maybe, perhaps one day will pass through their building. And in the mean time everyone who enters the post office is exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation… :rolleyes:
Seriously, anthrax spores are damn-near indestructable. Back during the Cold War, the US military dumped some anthrax spores on an uninhabited tropical island, just to see how hard it would be to disinfect the place. The results weren’t very hopeful: it took years of spraying the island with industrial-grade hydrogen peroxide (a chemical caustic enough to dissolve the skin off your body) to kill all of the anthrax spores. Basically, they had to completely sterilize the island, and kill every living on it.
As has been said, to kill anthrax spores, you’d need a seriously high level of gamma radiation. Roughly 5,000 kilorads - 1 kilorad is lethal to humans. Figure out the cost of installing the machinery for that, along with all the safety equipment, for one place - I’d estimate in the millions. Then multiply that by the number of post offices in the country. Ain’t going to happen.
We keep a guinea pig named Tony in our office. Our plan is to put Tony in a plastic bag with all our incoming mail and shake them together like shake n bake. Then wait a few days to see how he does before we open our mail.
Everyone knows guinea pigs aren’t really used like that anymore! 
“The simpler way is to get rid of public mail boxes.”
:eek:
The lines at post offices are already grindingly slow, at least in my experience sending registered or certified mail. And that’s with only a TINY fraction of Postal Service business being done in person. If all letters hade to be posted in person, the postal system would grind to a halt. The lines at every post office would look like a line for concert tickets or the Superbowl!
Do they even HAVE enough clerks to handle every single letter being posted in person?! It would be like going back to operator-only telephones with the modern volume of phone traffic – half of the country’s workforce would be postal clerks!
According to this story, people can sterilize their own mail by ironing mail with steam (dry heat doesn’t work). The story also mentions the use of gamma radiation in postal centers to bulk sterilize mail.
No, no, MC’s not saying that all letters would be deposited at the mailbox, he’s saying get rid of public mailboxes…you know, the big blue ones you see sitting on street corners. That way, you’d only be mailing stuff from your home, or from a post office.
Of course, what’s to stop someone from dropping a letter in somebody else’s mailbox, with the appropriate return address on it? Nuttin.
Can’t we just focus on electronic communication? That is, use files and programs to send (and print, if necessary) documents we would normally send a hard copy of? I know this couldn’t be done for many types of sensitive documents, where special papers, signatures, etc. are required, but switching to electronic forms might cut down the traffic to the point where public mailboxes could be eliminated. We have this huge infrastructure along which unfathomable amounts of crap travel; why don’t we figure out a way to use it as a way to promote public safety? I know I’d be glad to spend a few extra minutes a day printing letters and reports that we would otherwise receive in the mail, if it was safer for me.
BTW, I have trouble believing that a spore as hardy as anthrax couldn’t survive an ironing. I know it was just a short newsbite, but I have to say it: “Cite, please.”
Actually, steam is the most common way of killing spores in labs. Ever hear of an autoclave? It’s basically a big pressure cooker that uses pressure to make really hot steam, which then sterilizes anything inside. Any lab will have at least one autoclave for sterilizing supplies. As an aside, one way to test and make sure your autoclave is working is to include little amuples of botlulism spores with your load, then try and grow them. A working autoclave kills the spores.
Anyway, the reason steam is important is because water is a much better conductor of heat than air, as we all learned in high school chem.
Having said that, I’m also kind of skeptical about the ironing thing. Autoclaves use temperatures much much higher than you’ll get out of an iron, and typically run for 20 minutes or more.
I think bleach would be more effective against anthrax than heat.