Anthrax To Kill Snail Mail

omnirealm writes "Steven Levy over at NBC expressed his opinion that the new anthrax thread in our snail-mail is going to be a major catalyst to a general switch to e-mail as the primary means of written communication."

Comments

you're more likely to die

[mj6798]

from an infected paper cut. Pardon me while I'm not worried. And until E-mail gets the same legal standing as snail mail (complete with legally recognized notarization, authentication, and proof of delivery) we can't replace snail mail.

Mail beats Email

[maggard]

There a couple of serious impediments to abolishing mail.

1. Universal penetration. Everyone in the USA has a postal address. Park benches are legitimate delivery addresses (yes - tested in court.) Only a fraction of the population has email or will likely have such in the near future.
2. Universal transmission. I can send a postal letter around the world and assume that the recipient will be able to recieve it. From major world capitols to off-the-map slums postal service has a reasonably good tradition of getting through. Email again requires that the recipient haave the same or some alternative last-mile system - not at all typical.
3. There are no good address-lookup or general-delivery mechanisms for email. If I want to contact Somebody at BigCorp I can look up BigCorp's address and send a letter to Somebody there, it'll generally get manually routed properly. If I know the town Somebody lives in I can often simply look them up in a ubiquitious phonebook or online and assuming they're listed and have a sufficiently unique name I've got their address. There are some services that attempt to provide this for email but they're mostly useless.
4. There's a large body of law concerning the privacy of letters, the delivery of such, etc. This is NOT the case for email. Frankly I trust the folks of the USPS to transport my mail securely & reliably far more then I do the monkeys at my ISP and the servers between me & my email's destination.
5. While there are encryption and authenticaion mechanisms for email they're about useless as far as the general population or even most businesses are concerned. Postal mail has no authentication but it does generally get delivered to the right place securely.
6. Most postal addresses are good for both letters & package deliveries, neither of which is true for email.
7. Postal mail is free to recieve and only costs the sender some change. Email requires either a computer system and ISP or access to a public facility offering this.
8. Courts don't recognize email as a delivery mechanism and certianly not for material that must be signed for.

   Frankly with 1 case of transmission of anthrax by postal mail I think the whole topic is foolish and a sad attempt by a columnist to get some attention.

Re:What is an "Anthrax thread"?

[budgenator]

I was an NBC, Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, Defense NCO before I retired so here goes. Note I don't know your actual needs, threat levels ect. so your milage may vary, these are My own opinions and don't reflect any org's official policies, this is not intended to be authorative info so do your own research ect.

• Spores are used because they are more hardy than active bacteria, basicaly spores are desicated bacteria. That's why 70 percent alcohol is used to disinfect stronger alcohol would dryout the bacteria and actualy make them harder to kill (anthrax spores remain viable for as long as a half century)
• To get the spores, you need to grow the bacteria, use generaly use agar, beef brooth or something simmilar (I'm not sure what you would use for anthrax, but it can't be that hard to find out)
• once you get the bacteria grown, you dry out the culture media, maybe freeze-dry or something now you have a very concetrated source of bacteria spores. typicaly this is powdered and has a color similar to the culture media a brown, tan or dried blood color depending on the original culture media
• dilute the concentrated spore powder with a carrier like talcum powder to an appropriate working strength
• dust the carrier with the powder and deliver

To defend against this:

1. publish a policy that all mail to your organisation maybe open in the mail room, set up so a random number of pieces are checked, and anything suspicious.
2. open the mail in an isolation enviroment, look at OSHA's Bloodborne pathogens standard for guidelines on doing this
3. watch-out for powders, things that are fluorecent, maybe consider spraying with luminal to detect blood, unexpected arivials or thing that are out of character; why would you get porno pics in your biz mail ect.
4. Still unsure consider using ethylene-oxide sterilization of the mail

Actualy considering the threat from natural stuff like hepitius-B Aids, and even cold-flu viruses, these proceedures may actualy save lost time expenses from natural illnesses too.

Personaly I consider that mail to people in your distribution channel to be at higher risk than other employees, because they handle thing that are in turn redistributed to others. Given the long incubation times between contact and symptoms for most things, a problem here would spread long before any one would know there is a problem. Its not that hard to get your janitor to put disinfectants in his cleaning solutions, use vacuumes with HEPA filtrations ect.

I'm a dental technician now and we have to recieve bio-hazardous material routinely and follow the osha standards at work, the result is I always catch my cold from the wife and kids first! this stuff works. If your org expereinces a lot of absenteeism due to illness, infection control training may actualy be profitable due to reduced absentee expenses