The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) urges the U.S. Postal Service to consider using irradiation technology to sanitize mail and thus protect workers and the public from bioterrorism. ACSH is a public health consortium of over 350 leading physicians and scientists.
Just in the last few days, finding anthrax spores in a letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle led to the closing of both houses of Congress temporarily. Two postal workers have died of inhalation anthrax, and many more are being tested. Clearly, since other pieces of mail in New York City as well as Washington, DC, are known to have carried anthrax spores, the situation warrants rapid action to guard against further contamination and exposure.
The technology exists to safeguard the mail irradiation. Irradiation technology is already widely used in the United States to sterilize a variety of medical, hygiene and packaging products. Surgical gloves, bandages, plastic containers for the little creamers on restaurant tables, and tampons are but a few examples of irradiation-sterilized commodities in daily use.
Irradiation has been approved to kill disease-causing bacteria in a number of foods, such as poultry and red meat, and to sterilize herbs, spices and other food ingredients. Depending on the purpose, different "doses" of radiation are utilized. Bacteria are susceptible to relatively low doses, but bacterial spores, like those of anthrax, would require higher doses to be inactivated.
While the higher doses necessary to kill spores might not be compatible with food quality, there is no reason why they can't be used on mail, as they are for the other products mentioned above. Such irradiation leaves no residue and does not make the items radioactive. Further, it could be accomplished with machines called electron beam accelerators, which produce no irradiation energy when they are turned off, thus eliminating any possible exposure to workers.
"There are more than 50 facilities in the United States that use irradiation on a daily basis," stated Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, ACSH president "and there is no reason the process couldn't be adapted to sanitize our mail."
In the short term, it might be necessary to take mail to such facilities for processing, but a future goal might be to equip major postal centers with such means of safeguarding the mail. This would allow us not only to circumvent the current threat posed by anthrax, but would also act as a deterrent to similar bioterrorist attempts in the future.
