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back to Organic Consumers Assn. Stop Food Irradiation page Postal officials seek better anthrax tests Irradiation faulted for burned letters, long-delayed mail By Monica Davey, Chicago Tribune staff reporter December 16, 2001 Seven weeks after postal officials began using electron beam irradiation to cleanse mail of possible anthrax, the process has burned, discolored and delayed letters, sending officials searching for other ways to protect the nation's mail. Irradiation, which has already cost the financially strapped U.S. Postal Service millions of dollars, has proved to be far slower than expected, and has left some aides on Capitol Hill complaining that their mail is yellow, brittle, stuck together and smelly. "It is not as easy to use as we anticipated," said U.S. Postal Service spokesman Jim Mruk. "There have been unforeseen circumstances, and basically, that has led us to believe we need to look at something else other than irradiation. It isn't going to be enough." So far, postal officials are spending $3.9 million to use irradiation facilities in New Jersey and Ohio over the coming months, and have agreed to pay $40 million to Titan Industries to buy eight irradiation machines, with an option to buy 12 more. Those plans are moving forward, but officials also are looking at other methods to avoid future bioterror threats to the mail, including machines that could detect biological hazards in mail and systems to track all senders of mail. Postal officials say they never intended to irradiate all U.S. mail anyway, just a select portion. "We haven't thrown in the towel on irradiation," Mruk said. "For some kinds of mail, it may indeed be the best way to safeguard the mail. Right now it doesn't look like it's going to be the long-term solution for safeguarding the public." After anthrax-laced letters were discovered in October, millions of pieces of mail were sequestered and trucked to irradiation facilities to be sanitized. New mail addressed to government offices in Washington continues to be sent for irradiation. At the irradiation plants, loads of mail are placed on conveyor belts that lead into sealed facilities, where linear accelerators send beams of electrons into the mail, killing bacteria. The process--including long truck rides to and from the plants--is slow, said Dan Mihalko, a U.S. Postal Inspection Service official. The Lima, Ohio, facility, for example, can sanitize only two truckloads of mail a day, even as new government mail continues arriving each day, he said. Congressional aides said they only recently have started receiving a "trickle" of letters from mid-October, when the mail was first sequestered, and new mail hasn't come at all. Letters to Congress have an added delay after irradiation because a government contractor slits open the corner of every letter to check for evidence of powders. Other setbacks have cropped up with irradiation: Fires broke this month in the Bridgeport, N.J., plant, destroying 90 pounds of mail. An official for Ion Beam Applications, which operates the site, said a jammed conveyor caused the blazes. In Washington, meanwhile, more than 40 postal workers who were opening bundles of the sanitized mail this month said they felt sick, apparently from carbon monoxide trapped in the bundles by the irradiation process. The bundles are now being opened outside. "Clearly, this is not a one-size-fits-all solution," said Gene Del Polito, president of the Association for Postal Commerce. "We can't fry all the mail. If you do--with the delays, the burning--you will have totally destroyed the value of mail as a device." Wil Williams, spokesman at Titan Corp., which operates the Lima plant, said he had heard few reports of problems. "Pardon me, but so what?" he said of the complaints. "If it is happening, do you really want to die from anthrax or get an envelope with a slight brown tinge? It doesn't make any sense to me. We're trying to stop the spread of a deadly pathogen." Still, U.S. postal officials and political leaders are looking for other options. In recent days, members of Congress have held closed-door meetings with postal officials, scientists and others. One option being considered is making the sending of mail less anonymous, postal officials said. People might be asked to show identification when buying stamps or might buy stamps from kiosks where video cameras captured their images. Another method under consideration is screening mail at postal facilities with "hazard detection equipment" that could sense biological dangers in closed letters. The government has used comparable sensor equipment in battlefield situations to test for biological weapons, said an industry official who did not wish to be named. The sensors check for particles of certain sizes and whether they're alive. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0112160394dec16.story

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