stupid anthrax q: would microwaving your snail mail help?

Dr. Evil drevil at sidereal.kz
Fri Oct 19 02:46:58 PDT 2001


> 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.





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