Post office weighs how to 'treat' the mail

Since Sept. 11, however, 20 billion pieces of mail have been sorted. Just a handful of those have been contaminated, so far as officials know. So the risks appear to be minuscule.

Yet anthrax does spark unusual levels of fear. "It's seen as a violation of the body - and so people become afraid and tend to act irrationally," says Howard Reisner, an immunologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In part to calm fears, the post office is considering several practical steps.

• Irradiation. The same process is used extensively by the meat and fruit industries - and can render harmless any bacteria on the inside or outside of envelopes. It's still unclear which type of high-energy rays would work best.

X-rays, for instance, would be useful - and can penetrate an object. But nearby workers would have to be protected.

Gamma rays - used by meat producers - may be the best option, experts say. Unlike microwaves, they're "cold," so they won't cook the mail. They're also relatively fast: In meat plants, a semi-trailer full of ground beef - 40,000 pounds - is decontaminated in about two hours. The cost would be about 1 cent per envelope.

• Mail "profiling." Under such a system, says Eli Argon, CEO of Advanced Mail Management in Potomac, Md., some letters would be pulled out for special scrutiny on the basis of their origination and destination points. Mail from New Jersey sent to high-profile buildings, for instance, might receive extra scrutiny. Like racial profiling, however, this could raise civil rights concerns.

• A sophisticated bar-code system that's the mail's equivalent of telephone caller ID. It includes detailed return-address information that allows the post office and recipients to know exactly who sent the letter - and to trace its path throughout the mail system. Although the system would likely raise privacy concerns, it would make anonymous mailings much more difficult.

All these steps could help make the mail safer, though some caution against overreaction. "Does Des Moines [Iowa] really need to set up an irradiation system for the mail? Probably not," says Dr. Jim Dickson, a microbiologist at Iowa State University in Ames. "But in Washington, D.C., there might be a justification for irradiating some mail."

Clements, meanwhile, urges individuals to "do something practical" - and not microwave or steam-iron the mail. "Take your spouse out to dinner, hug your child, pray, whatever it is."

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