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RE: "claims" vs failure to act
This is a valid point both ways. My grandfather was a postal employee in a main post office, and shared many anecdotes of what people tried to mail. Among them was the result of young ladies perfuming letters with dusting powder - when the letter hit the machinery there was a cloud of powder, and you could smell it all through the LARGE sorting room.
Dave Neil
-----Original Message-----
From: Dukelow, James S Jr [mailto:jim.dukelow@PNL.GOV]
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 3:30 PM
To: BERNARD L COHEN; Sandy Perle
Cc: tedrock@CPCUG.ORG; J. J. Rozental; Radsafe; powernet@hps1.org
Subject: RE: "claims" vs failure to act
Bernard Cohen and Sandy Perle wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: BERNARD L COHEN [mailto:blc+@PITT.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 6:23 AM
To: Sandy Perle
Cc: tedrock@CPCUG.ORG; J. J. Rozental; Radsafe; powernet@hps1.org
Subject: RE: Sec. Ridge accurately addresses the impact of a "dirty
bomb"
[SP] >, take the anthrax deaths in DC and NY, where our scientists
> didn't even know that anthrax would simply move through the molecular gaps in the
> paper envelopes
[BC] --Not having known something is very different from deception.
Were there claims that anthrax could not get through the envelopes?
====================
There may not have been explicit claims that anthrax could get through envelopes, but there was a failure to take appropriate mitigating actions that was equivalent to an implicit belief that anthrax could not get through envelopes. That failure to respond was at least partly responsible for the deaths of a couple of postal workers.
To be fair, experts at CDC and elsewhere appear to have overgeneralized from infectiousness data in a special population. They had hard data on how many anthrax spores seem to be required to infect workers exposed to animal skins and carcasses. The problem is that such workers are not immunologically naive and probably require a much larger exposure than someone who has not been exposed to anthrax spores. We know more now and are unlikely to make the same mistake again.
As a side note, the transmission pathway was almost certainly through incompletely sealed seams, not through the "molecular structure". The pathway should have been obvious to any risk analyst with some imagination and some experience with the kinds of envelopes that you buy at the local store, particularly if he or she was talking to someone familiar with post office sorting and handling machinery.
Best regards.
Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov
These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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