Posted on 10/23/2001 6:44:41 PM PDT by Aquinasfan
This is all I need to read. No more bills for a few months...
Yeah, I can just picture some PO'd postal guy running around
with a radio-active wand.
At least bullets don't make your hair fall out.
From the article above. I hope the irradiation equipment comes on line soon. It's supposed to increase the cost of a letter by one cent.
Not technically possible. It will take years just to get the permits for this equipment, let alone to build it. And I am not convinced that it will work against Antrax spores.
From a CNN interview:
GUILLEMIN: Sunshine destroys anthrax spores, but very little else does. Heat doesn't, radiation doesn't. It's resistant to explosives. That's precisely the reason why anthrax was developed as a weapon, because it's tough, whereas most bacteria and viruses are fragile.Jeanne Guillemin is a medical anthropologist, and a Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at MIT's Security Studies Program. In 1992, she was part of a team that investigated a suspicious anthrax epidemic that took place in 1979 in the former USSR. She is an affiliate of the Harvard-Sussex Program, which is involved with the elimination of chemical and biological weapons.
The amount of radiation typically given to kill bacteria in food is not sufficient for spores.
Doses of radiation used industrially to process foods are stated in terms of "D-value" or the dose that will kill 90% of the target organisms. Since the killing is logarithmic, 2D will kill 99%, 3D will kill 99.9% 4D will kill 99.99%, etc. It is not uncommon to give a "4D" dose. E.coli O157 has a D-value of 0.3 kiloGray.(1 Gray=100 rad) The usual dose given to food is 1.2kiloGy (4D).
According to CDC data on food irradiation, the D-value for sporulated (spore form) bacteria in general (not anthrax specifically) is 2.8 kilogray. The 4D dose would be 11.2 kiloGy. I do not know if anyone has actually done dose/response curves for anthrax spores specifically. I have seen doses mentioned as high as 50 kiloGy (5 million rad). As you can see, this is over 40 times the dose needed to eradicate E.Coli. I don't know anything about the typical throughput time for commercial food irradiators, but with a radiation source with a fixed output like gamma radiation (with small daily decrease due to radioactive decay) it will take approximately 40 times as long to achieve these types of doses.
(Paging Physicist to see if any key scientific points have been overlooked.)
Don't try this at home kids.
The solution??? Take your mail with you to the tanning salon.
I'm no physicist, but isn't sunshine itself a form of radiation? Why isn't it possible to artificially replicate this form of radiation and thus kill the spores? Just wondering.
The company had already been getting lots of government contracts to irradiate food and I'm hoping that they'll get a lot more now to irradiate the mail! Private mail carriers like FedEx will probably want to use their services also.
This may still be a good stock to invest in even at $20. a share.
Gamma radiation is more energetic than sunlight, therefore some dose will kill anything. The comparision with food irradiation makes perfect sense. You don't want the food cooked or affected in any noticable way, so the dosage would be minimized. But we don't care if ordinary mail is cooked.
Packages containing food or electronic equipment are another matter.
There is a new book out that effectively debunks the environmentalist wacko claims. It is written by a "reformed" Green. :) There is a really good review of the book which I'm linking you to here, if you're interested:
"The Skeptical Environmetalist" by Bjorn Lomborg - HERE
BTTT
Even if this is true, we don't seem to be left with any alternatives. Otherwise, if the terrorists drop ten envelopes a day into the mail, they will have effectively ended the postal system.
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