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To: Shermy
"A 51-year-old woman living in Mercer County, N.J., left a local hospital Oct. 28 after being treated for a case of skin anthrax."

This is Case 18 by UCLA's reckoning. The patient is a bookkeeper and thus handles quite a bit of mail; the presumption is that she tore open a piece of mail cross-contaminated by the 10/9 (Leahy and Daschle) letters at the Hamilton Township processing facility where four postal workers were infected.

I thought that anthrax spores passed through envelope paper like sand through a sieve, but apparently the paper acts more like a sponge. Spores were absorbed by the Leahy and Daschle envelopes, then were squeezed out by the postal handling machinery. Other envelopes absorbed these spores in turn; when those cross-contaiminated envelopes were ripped, the spores along the tear became aerosolized. For Case 18, that meant contracting cutaneous anthrax through a small break in her facial skin (such as a pimple); for poor Otillie Lundgren, who habitually ripped her junk mail in half, that meant dying of inhalation anthrax. So the lesson for today, kids, is to use a letter opener, the sharper the better.

87 posted on 08/13/2002 1:54:00 PM PDT by Fabozz
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To: Fabozz; Shermy
Whoops, I see you found that link for yourself. That's what I get for replying through "my comments" rather than going to the thread.
88 posted on 08/13/2002 2:00:12 PM PDT by Fabozz
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