...

This is a stupid question but as I'm not a biologist, I'll ask it anyway and risk looking foolish...

Would it help to microwave your mail if you don't know where it came from and you're sure it doesn't contain an objects? i.e. it's not a CD you've ordered from Amazon. :)

Do anthrax spores get cooked enough by microwaves to be killed, or are they too dry in spore form to be nuked?

Of course, if we start mass nuking our mail, the terrorists might mail us something that would explode when nuked... still, for now it's a question to ask.

Spores tend to be pretty rugged. One of the reasons anthrax is such an ideal weapon is that its spores are rugged enough to tolerate being used on missiles and bombs, which means extremes of temperature, I supose. I think you would need to microwave it pretty intensely to kill it. Microwave radiation is non-ionizing so it kills things by heating the entire things, which means you need to use enough heat to denature enough proteins to stop metabolism. Using radio isotopes to irradiate it would be a different matter. That might be much more effective and would do less damage to the mail than a microwave oven. The right kinds of radiation are ionizing, which causes very reactive free radicals to be formed in the cell. It doesn't take very many of these free radicals to damage the DNA beyond usefulness, usually by breaking it. Some organisms are radio resistant, which means they have hyper-active DNA repair systems and multiple copies of important enzymes. This comes at a cost of needing more energy to run these systems and to build more DNA so the organisms are at a disadvantage compared to non-radio-resistant organisms in non-radio environments. If you wanted to build a real weapon-type anthrax you could do stuff like grow it with increasing levels of antiobiotics, so it would get resistant to them, and then you could also expose it to heat, radiation, whatever. I'm sure the superpowers have done that kind of stuff. The principles behind this are simple, but the practice is probably quite a challenge. It would be interesting to know if the anthrax that is showing up in the mail is the natural stuff or some kind of weapon-grade stuff. The safest thing to do is to stick to email. In a yurt. In Antarctica.

One thing I would like to buy is a pressure cooker. Another is a kind of charger that charges water with CO2, to make homemade fizzy water insteado f buying it at stores. In Russia these things were called syphons. Any ideas? igor Morten Liebach wrote:

On 16, Oct, 2001 at 09:22:19AM -0500, Igor Chudov wrote:

...

My guess would be that microwaving them will not help. Microwaves heat up moist things by starting electric currents in them. Anthrax spores are not moist and probably will not even heat up.

Right.

...

Try your regular stove. Set it to, say, 400 degrees and pray that the papers will remain legible. I'd prbobably be more likely to be attacked by meteorites or abducted by aliens than be anthraxed via mail, but *if* I had to sterilize mail, I would use a stove.

In labs an autoclave is used to sterilize everything.

Autoclaves are basically pressure cookers, high pressure steam at 121 deg. Celsius and ~2 Bar kill everything.

The effectivity of autoclaves is tested with spores from Bacillus stearothermophilus, which is some of the most resistant there is, and I suspect B. anthracium is quite heat resistant too, as most other Bacillus species.

But I'd use a pressure cooker to kill the spores if I had the need (and didn't have an autoclave, that is). The paper probably wouldn't fall apart, though the ink might not be readable after having been wet.

These things I know from having worked as a lab technician in a microbiological lab once.

Have a nice day

Morten

-- Morten Liebach PGP-key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xD796A4EB https://pc89225.stofanet.dk/ || http://pc89225.stofanet.dk/

- Igor.

Anyone have thoughts or (?) knowledge on efficacy, or guidelines on how long the heating should last for decontamination?

I would not think that ordinary ironing would effectively decontaminate letters with anthrax in them. These are tough spores. The only way to really find out what works would be to try the experiment, but they need a lot of heat, so you might need to do a lot of ironing. Irradiation is a much better bet. Better still is a plain old gas mask, or maybe some anthrax vaccine. Oh wait, civilians aren't allowed to have vaccine because safety isn't really the goal here.

The obvious terrorist counter-countermeasure would be to add a heat-activated agent to the weapon.

There is no counter-countermeasure necessary. The goal of the terrorists isn't to take down America by killing Americans. The goal of anthrax is to spread hysteria and terror, and it is doing that with great efficacy. The counter-measure to hysteria is knowledge. There is no counter-measure to knowledge, which is why it's so cool. Unfortunately the US government is contributing to the hysteria by withholding knowledge. Fortunately we have the Internet which lets us find information for ourselves.

Sounds like somebody doesn't do their own washing/ironing :) The steam in an iron doesn't get anywhere that hot, it'd ruin the clothes. Also an iron will have steam escaping around the edges (when you hit the steam button especially) and this has the potential to spread un-heated spores into the atmosphere. On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Karsten M. Self wrote:

This suggestion turned up on Kuro5hin, a web discussion site (Slashdot's baby brother):

If you want to sterilize your mail, simply place the unopened envelope on an ironing board and place a damp, thin cloth on top of it. Then iron it. Yes, iron it. Just like you would iron your pants. The damp heat will kill any bacteria, including anthrax, inside the envelope, and you will be safe.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2001/10/18/44222/299/16#16

Probably more accessible to most of the population (and workplaces) than claves, pressure cookers, or irradiation equipment.

Anyone have thoughts or (?) knowledge on efficacy, or guidelines on how long the heating should last for decontamination?

-- ____________________________________________________________________ The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. Edmund Burke (1784) The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

At 03:13 PM 10/19/2001 -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:

/me retreats to iron w/ thermometer.

Black and Decker "Light 'n' Easy" iron, cotton dishtowl (folded quarto), "Good Cook" dial thermometer inserted under top fold. With four minutes' preheat, temperature is off the scale (2200F), extrapolating, it looks to be 2700-2800F. After about two minutes, there's a slight yellowing of the dishtowel.

Is it possible you're off by a factor of 10 here? I am very skeptical that you have an iron which heats up to 2200 or 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. I would expect a little more than a slight yellowing of the dish towel at those temperatures, unless you have asbestos dish towels you use along with your superheated iron. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@well.com "We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids

Dare I say it? Another reason to use just 7-bit ASCII. I'm not particularly religious on this issue, but for text-based discussions like the ones we have here, anything else just doesn't seem necessary, and can lead to strange results like what we just saw. -Declan On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 04:13:19PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:

Above mistranslates ISO-8859-1 encoded \260 (octal), the degree sign, as a zero.

Temperatures should read 220 F, 270 F, and 280 F, not thousands of degrees.

on Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 10:17:31AM -0700, Tim May (tcmay@got.net) wrote:

On Saturday, October 20, 2001, at 09:13 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

...

Dare I say it? Another reason to use just 7-bit ASCII.

I'm not particularly religious on this issue, but for text-based discussions like the ones we have here, anything else just doesn't seem necessary, and can lead to strange results like what we just saw.

As for the "degrees" issue, confusion about the symbol was one of the reasons the scientific community abandoned use of the symbol at least 30 years ago. 212 F and 100 C are the accepted ways of reporting temperature...the degree symbol was redundant anyway and led to typesetting problems.

Thanks, wasn't aware of that. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ Land of the free Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]