As I said before, if I worked for the postal service I'd be wearing latex gloves and a soft cloth mask with an N100 filter. You can get the gloves at Costco and the mask at Home Depot or Sherwin Williams.
It may not be long before that happens, broadly, for postal workers.
I noted reports that Bush had ordered increase in stockpiling of certain drugs; in seperate reports all DC postal employees were urged to go on Cipro. Could ordering antibiotics for all postal employees nation wide - partly to avoid shutting down the entire system - be far off?
We've heard many 'experts' making statements on this bio attack along the lines of "at least Anthrax is not contagious; we can treat it with antibiotics if caught early" -- implying that in some ways the terrorists are screwing up via their choice of bioattack.
Terror doesn't have to be accomplished daily to be effective. They presumably have plans to carry on attacks of terror for a long time.
Consider this -- we have no effective counter measures for a prolonged Anthrax specific bioattack against a target like the post office -- precisely because its a bacteria, and not a virus (with an available vaccine).
Ah, but we have powerfull anti-biotics the experts say.
True, but those same experts also warn of side effects and reduced effectiveness of the drugs. The reality is that people can not remain on antibiotics indefinitely. If attacks go on indefinitely against a single target, we have problems here.
Sure - they will find ways to treat / sterilize incoming mail and reduce the danger in handling plants, but unless you treat something at the source, contaminants are going to be present as mail makes its way through the system to the plants.
In the interim until a fool proof method to assure that mail is sterilized is deployed, I do not think the public is going to be reassured by the thought of seeing our postal employees walking down the street in masks, gloves and other protective gear. Will they accept the mail?
If they close down mail faciities then the mail will be re-routed through another facility. The volume of mail is probably low right now due to recession - nothing like it ordinarily is at Christmas time, for example.
Low is relative - even with a deep recession was/is/will beunderway there will still be over a hundred billion pieces of mail handled by the post office.
My company still gets most of its payments via the mail. Most of its bills. Very little electronic funds transfer as yet except for our largest customers.
The junk mail I can live without but the cascading effect of some rapid failure in the freight & postal systems could be quite horrific to the economy.
You seem to assume that there are pounds of this stuff out there - you may be right. We'll see, unfortunately.
For now it seems to be a safer assumption to make -- that they have planned this for some time and plan to use it, perhaps in ways that we don't intend (for surprise and shock) -- so I assume they have a bunch of kegs of the stuff.
back to the foreign affairs component, if indeed the perpetrators of the bioattack are foreign terrorists operating here,
Hopefully I / others are not giving the terrorists too much credit here, but it does seem that they have the ability to plan and think ahead. Their diversified structure, operating out of many countries, makes me wonder if they anticipated Rumsfeld's comment about "taking the battle to them [in countries wherever they are]".
It would seem so; if indeed their goal is to seriously destabilize governments all over the world and indeed make the US its unwitting partner, the terrorists most powerful weapon is persistance. They have to keep attacking. They have to keep allowing their operations overseas to be found culpable. They need to keep baiting the US to 'come and get me'.
Breaking news, Another mail processing center involved - Hamilton township - and employee there now a inhalational anthrax case. |
