USPS: glowing by leaps and bounds

[Bill Stewart]

At 04:23 AM 10/23/2001 -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:
>Irradiation equipment is being considered for mail processing, heard
>both over NPR's Morning Edition, and referenced in a story posted to
>Yahoo!:     http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ksat/20011022/lo/932238_1.html
>...

Adds new meaning to a "glowing letter of recommendation" :-)

>I would hope that relatively short-term leases are being considered.
>Or is this going to be a long-term threat?

This isn't the kind of thing you back off on, once you've started,
because the potential threat of muckers out there doesn't decrease over time,
thought the number of wannabees and copycats may be temporarily high.
The real question is how much does the government want to either
scare us about the threats or reassure us about how well
they're protecting us, or both - given that they've been waving the
anthrax flag for four or five years now, I'd expect this is long term.

>Any pointers on packaging for photographic and/or magnetic media through
>mail to survive irradiation equipment?  How about the magstrips on all
>those credit cards issued through the mail?

Magnetic media shouldn't be bothered - you need to be careful around
X-ray machines, but that's because of electromagnets, not radiation.
Unexposed photographic film could have a real problem with this,
depending on quite what they're using.
I'd worry more about medicines and other biologicals and foods -
obviously you're not going to ship a live-culture vaccine through this...