You may be sorry you asked.
Let's say that Abdul the Terrorist takes 250 anthraxed envelopes and drops them into the mailbox.
They get picked up and dropped into a large sack. The sack gets emptied onto a table at the post office.
Fred the Postal Worker then picks each one up, and drops it into the sorting machine.
Each envelope has two things in common: 1) they all go down different routes, to different addresses, handled once by each postal worker along the way, and 2) they each are handled by Fred the Postal Worker.
Fred the Postal Worker receives 250 times the exposure of any other person involved in handling the envelopes. (I did not include the carrier who removed them from the mailbox, because he handled them as a unit, rather than shuffling individual envelopes around.)
Obviously this is A) conjecture, and B) rather simplified from whatever actual procedures are involved. I haven't been a postal worker for over 30 years. But I do believe that there are likely a few people in the handling chain who receive a much greater exposure -- by virtue of handling more than one envelope involved in a mass mailing.
The implication, of course, is that if this scenario is correct, there will be a lot of recipients of tainted envelopes.
As Drudge says, developing...
Hmmm, could be you are brilliant.
Seems to me the sh!t is about to hit the fan. Why? Because the nano-second that Daschle's office got the letter, the entire US Capitol work force got on Cipro. Questions being asked include:"Would it not be logical to trace back immediately the route this letter had taken, which would have resulted in the Brentwood postal workers getting treatment?" and "Isn't this negligence?"
I wonder if this would have been intentional. I can see how the post office would be where inhalational anthrax would be most likely because of the way the letters are dumped out and sorted.