Cut risks of receiving anthrax through mail
By John Yaukey
Gannett News Service
If you do the math, your odds of getting anthrax through the mail are infinitesimal despite the growing concern about bioterrorism and the Postal Service.
Gannett News Service
But statistical probabilities, regardless of how remote, seem cold comfort as images of decontamination crews spraying postal stations fill front pages and TV screens.
Postal worker Kimberly Hendricks collects mail in Detroit. Companies are struggling to ensure incoming mail is free of disease spores.
And then there is the rhetoric and reaction from the Postal Service itself.
Recently, Postmaster General John Potter warned, "There are no guarantees that mail is safe."
Meanwhile, postal officials are considering spending upward of $1 billion on technology to irradiate mail in hopes of killing anthrax spores.
It all raises questions — even in spite of the overwhelming odds in favor of safety.
Could an otherwise clean envelope — one bound for your home — become dangerously contaminated if it rubs against an anthrax-toting package or letter that had, say, burst open in transit?
"It's improbable," said Mark Nicas, an expert in environmental health at the University of California at Berkeley. "But impossible? The fact is, there are no hard and fast answers to these questions."
Nor are there any foolproof solutions for dealing with a contaminated postal system. There is no practical way to buffer yourself fully from the mail short of retreating to a mountain cabin.
USA Today
That said, you could try to reduce your potential for exposure to mail-borne anthrax by circumventing the postal system whenever possible — a task for which the Internet was, in part, created (so Cold War scientists could shuttle data to one another quickly).
A White House mail room employee sorts mail addressed to the president. The volume of mail to the White House increased starting a few days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and continues to be high.
These days you can receive and pay at least some of your bills, read your favorite magazines and write to friends and family all using highly affordable online services.
But one caveat: Some of these things are not easily done, nor can they be done overnight.
"You don't just pop a switch and suddenly all your mail is online," said Avivah Litan, an analyst with the Gartner research firm who tracks online bill paying and other services that could potentially supplant postal correspondence. "A lot of this can be cumbersome to do, which is why it hasn't caught on very quickly."
Your options:
E-mail for personal use
The Internet's tried and true killer app is one of those technologies you can just switch on. While you're clearly not expecting any anthrax in the letters from your friends or family, using e-mail can help keep personal communications out of the postal stream where innocent letters may, at least in theory, pick up stray spores. If you don't have an e-mail account, visit Yahoo!.
Pay bills online
This is in its infancy because it requires a good deal of faith in online security, which many people lack, and it can be a bit of a pain to arrange.
There are two options here: using one of the bill paying services offered through some of the major Internet service providers (ISPs), Internet portals and the Postal Service, or going through a major bank or financial service.
The ISP and portal services will only work with those companies that have agreed to sign up for it, and those include most major companies that send bills to consumers on a regular basis.
"The average person can get rid of roughly a third to half of their mailed bills using one of these services," said Randy McCoy, with CheckFree, which provides the infrastructure for online bill-paying services. "This is typically five to seven bills a month out of say a dozen or so."
Opening an account entails notifying your bank and authorizing direct payment access to your checking account (most services won't use credit cards because they charge the biller a percentage of the amount billed). You must then instruct the billers you want to pay online to send the bills to your new electronic account. The bills are posted on a personal Web site where you can review them and authorize payment. E-mail notifies you when a new bill has arrived on the site. These services typically cost $5 to $7 a month.
Some of the most popular online billing services are offered by AOL (no membership required), MSN (no membership required), Yahoo! and the U.S. Postal Service.
You can take this a step further by going to American Express or Citibank.
These institutions will take any and all bills and post them on a personal Web site where you can review them and then issue electronic payment instructions. These services cost $9 to $12 a month.
Setup is similar to that of the ISP and portal services: Open the account, then contact all the billers with rerouting instructions. Companies that do not bill online will have to mail your bills to the service where they must be scanned.
You also can pay some of your regular monthly expenses — but only recurring identical amounts such as your health club membership or mortgage — directly with your credit or debit card so nothing arrives in the mail. This requires giving someone else direct access to your bank or credit account without having to seek authorization for each withdrawal. Varying monthly expenses such as utility bills can be paid this way as well, but they require that the consumer be notified of the amount in advance.
For more information, visit the Web site of the Electronic Payments Association.
Online publications
Many magazines are available online now. To find out which ones are, go to a search engine like Google and type in the name of the publication. You may find only abbreviated editions are available online. Don't worry about daily newspapers, as most are not delivered through the postal system.
Mailing lists removal
This entails calling the Direct Marketing Association in Farmingdale, N.Y. (212) 768-7277 or visiting its Web site and following the instructions. This is effective, but it can take up to 30 days to process the request, after which the DMA says you should start to see a "gradual decrease in unsolicited mail."
None of these strategies will eliminate the mail altogether, but they should significantly reduce the flow to your front door.
Once mail has reached your home, there's little you can do other than scrutinize it carefully for suspicious signs, such as a return address that doesn't match the postmark, or lack of a return address altogether.
According to the Postal Service, a suspicious letter is also likely to be hand-addressed from someone unknown, lumpy in appearance and sealed with tape. Anyone who receives such mail is advised to place it in a plastic bag, thoroughly wash any body parts that have come in contact with it and notify the authorities.
Despite some of the rumors now circulating, it's not practical to sterilize mail using common household technology. Anthrax spores typically come in dry powder form and resist the kind of heat produced in a microwave oven (microwaves exploit the moisture in food to cook).
While postal authorities have talked about irradiating mail at handling centers, there is no home version of this technology.
The most cost-effective peace of mind might come from the low end of the technology spectrum: masks which can reduce the risk of inhaled anthrax by as much as 80 percent, according to anthrax experts.
For the latest medical and scientific news on the disease, visit the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site.
