[mercy]

It's a damn good thing you picked up that handle AFTER 9/11. Otherwise the boys in the blue suits would be around asking WHAT did you know and WHEN did you know it? You're still prescient as far as I'm concerned. ;)

[newsperson999]

TOPEKA, Kan., Associated Press -- Officials sent 175 people home Tuesday from a U.S. Postal Service repair facility that received equipment from East Coast mail centers involved in anthrax cases.

Some of the machinery came from the Brentwood mail center in Washington, D.C., and from facilities in New Jersey and Florida where letters containing anthrax spores had been handled, said Dr. Larry Rumans, the Shawnee County health officer.

He said the U.S. Postal Service Central Repairs Facility was closed as a precaution because of what he referred to as a credible potential exposure.

He said no anthrax spores had been found on the site, a large building in an industrial warehouse complex near the Forbes Field airport on the city's south side. It was not known how long the building would be closed.

Rumans said the people working in the building, employed either by the postal service or a private contractor, ASI Inc., had all been encouraged to contact either their own doctors or the county health department to begin precautionary treatment with antibiotics.

He said 10 or 11 of the people had exhibited flu-like symptoms Dr. Gianfranco Pezzino, the state epidemiologist, said his department has received many calls from people around Kansas expressing concern that they might have been exposed to anthrax, but no cases have been confirmed.

"This is the one that looks more serious," he said.

State health officials have conducted tests and said they don't expect results for 24 to 72 hours. Rumans said health officials did not know how long equipment from the three postal facilities had been at the repair center, but that it arrived after Sept. 11.

He said he did not know what form of transportation was used to get the equipment to Topeka. Rumans said he believed about 70 percent of the nation's mail-handling equipment is sent to Topeka when it needs repair.

[Nuke'm Glowing]

LOL, just a bystander in the highway of life now. Or is that an armadillo trying to cross the interstate of life. I always get that wrong.

[Bill Rice]

"You're still prescient as far as I'm concerned. ;)"

LOL - I had to paste "prescient" into Word and use the thesaurus!

I've posted this elsewhere, but this is a good place too - What if OBL and his ilk's real goal is to contaminate the mail equipment so it in turn infects everyone's mail going through it? We get death delivered right to our door!

Wouldn't it be interesting to do some tests to see what antibodies all the "militant" arabs here have that aren't part of our standard innoculations? Might just show what they know that we don't.