[antivenom]

Gas Pumped Into Senate Office to Kill Anthrax

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With nearby streets closed to traffic, workers on Saturday began pumping chlorine gas into the office of Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle to clean up deadly anthrax bacteria left by a contaminated letter opened in his office in October. The fumigation with chlorine dioxide gas at Daschle's office suite in the Senate's Hart office building began at 3 a.m. and was expected to last about 15 hours, said Capitol Police spokesman Dan Nichols.

The building has been closed since a few days after a letter laced with anthrax was opened in the South Dakota senator's office on Oct. 15, exposing over two dozen office workers to the potential germ warfare agent.

http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml;jsessionid=C15I3LJ1TTR3WCRBAEZSFEYKEEATIIWD?type=topnews&StoryID=421407

NO wonder the postal people are going postal...what if you worked in an environment that had the SAME anthrax but don't seem to get this type of clean up...

[Alamo-Girl]

It does indeed look like a double standard ... unless of course what was done for the USPO was adequate and what is being done for the Senate is pampering.

[bvw]

I remember that our own Ft Derrick bio-warfare decontamination expert didn't think highly of the cholrine gas technique. His experience was that it didn't kill the spore form of anthrax completely. I don't know why any experts think it would -- the spores are completly dyhydrated, dense, where would the cholrine latch into them?

The retired Ft Derrick expert decontaimined hundreds of buildings, he should know. He used formaldehyde gas. I suspect that the simple sugar of formaldehyde would cause the spores to open up and then kill 'em. Carbon loves carbon is the rule.