Germination Testing

[stormymater]

Originally Posted by carolyn137

No, b'c the only postal zip codes to be involved are those in the Washington DC area that service the White House and the Senate Building and other goverment buildings.

We had anthrax scare in Raleigh, NC, post office back then too (oddly also named Brentwood like the PO in SE DC). We had many very frightened postal workers after that poor guy died from anthrax (after being seen several times). A LOT of ciprofloxacin got prescribed then.
I found this to be interesting -
"Page 12 GAO-05-251 Anthrax Detection
Mail processing facilities use several types of high-speed machines to
process letters. At the facility that initially receives a letter for mailing, an
advanced facer-canceller system cancels the postage stamp. For
identification and sorting, other machines with optical character readers
apply bar codes and markings (that is, identification tags) to the
envelopes. The tags identify the time and date of processing, the machine
and facility that processed the envelope, and the delivery destination.
During fall 2001, USPS used this information to track the path of
contaminated envelopes through the mail system.
Delivery bar code sorter (DBCS) machines sort the mail. One machine
alone processes about 37,000 letters an hour, using pinch belts that
repeatedly squeeze the letters. During processing, paper dust accumulates,
particularly near pinch rollers that move the mail through the machine.
Since the rollers and optical readers are hard to access with vacuum nozzles, compressed air was typically used to blow debris out of the
machine. The compressed air was, however, banned in October 2001
because of concern about the potential for spreading anthrax in mail
processing facilities."
www.gao.gov/new.items/d05251.pdf