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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RocketMan who wrote (6849)	10/22/2001 7:42:17 PM
From: Selectric II	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The Brentwood post office is a major facility for U.S. Government mail sorting. It's not where it's located that counts, but what it does that counts.

To: RocketMan who wrote (6849)	10/22/2001 9:33:21 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

The neighborhood of the postal facility has nothing to do with the race of the people who work there. It's a civil service job, with preference given to veterans. Very racially mixed, white/black/Asian pretty much equal around here, Hispanics are less common. More blacks in supervisor positions than Asians. I have never been in Brentwood but have been in Merrifield and Dulles - I am familiar with the way the postal service handles the mail because I've represented many postal workers in various cases. I called the local APWU this morning before the news came out just to see if they had any info on Brentwood. The person who came down sick this weekend is in the clerk craft, handling express mail. Not window clerk, not clerk-carrier. That means he/she manually sorts and carries mail within postal service facilities. Now the following is a guess on my part - a handwritten envelope probably did not go through a mail sorter machine, but it was probably shipped to Brentwood in a sack or a bin, put into a sorter, rejected, and hand sorted. The envelope was probably carried from place to place in a tray, and the trays are reused. Or there may be more envelopes out there. It's obviously not impossible for any powder which is sealed in mail to get out due to pressure and mechanical forces - if anyone said that then they are foolish. Take a look at an envelope flap and you will see that the glue strip on most of them doesn't go all the way across. There is a space for air to get out when you seal the envelope.

To: RocketMan who wrote (6849)	10/23/2001 7:53:22 PM
From: Jill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Me too, RM. Who's to trust Thompson for instance, who said the first Fla case was isolated--? And the CDC etc--if something is one micron in size, and those envelopes filled w/ powder go through sorting machines--who wouldn't have thought to worry? What do they mean, they thought it couldn't go through an envelope? And in any case they didn't even provide GLOVES to the postal workers. At the same time they're saying you need 8000 spores for inhalation anthrax they're saying maybe ONE spore landed on the baby who got cutaneous. So folks don't worry about contamination of your letter if it happened to be sorted right after an anthrax letter...and containment pools are safe...and smallpox unlikely...even worse I hope they never do anything with the hemorrhagic fevers