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Oct. 31st, 2001 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scottobearA couple of my friends are seriously talking about wearing latex gloves when they handle their mail at home. I feel silly telling them that they shouldn't do that - everyone's scared, the FBI's apparent failure to make any progress tracking down the culprits is frustrating, nothing they tell us seems very sincere or comforting. You do what you can.
My reasoning, though, goes something like this: everything I'm hearing from the CDC and the press, and everything I've managed to infer from the points where the CDC and the press are obviously wrong and/or hedging their bets, suggests to me that wearing gloves to touch my mail would be a thoroughly empty gesture.
If you accept that:
1) spores can infect a random piece of mail through incidental contact with another incidentally infected object, and that
2) those spores could conceivably infect you by the time they get to you,
then it must be obvious that latex gloves aren't going to do you a lick of good.
First, there is the obvious point that you could just as easily inhale the spores as get them on your skin. So make sure you buy a face mask while you're at the drugstore.
But it's more than that, really. Let's say I start wearing gloves to handle the mail that gets dropped in the mailbox every day. If I am seriously concerned about the spores that could conceivably be stuck to the mail, it would be idiotic for us to not also be concerned about the spores that could conceivably be stuck to the mailbox itself; and any area around it, including my door and entryway. There's no necessary limit to the number of incidental contact-based infections that could occur before the chance of transmission becomes nil; you've already accepted that an arbitrary number got the spores as far as your doorstep, so it would be foolish not to assume that an arbitrary number more could still occur.
If there could be spores in your mail, and if incidental contact is a reliable vector, then there could be spores already anywhere in your house. There could be spores in your kitchen. There could be spores on your clothes. There could be spores on my clothes when I come to visit you. There could very well be spores in the mailroom at work, which means there could be spores on the elevator button that the mail guy pushes when he comes to deliver the mail. There could be spores on the snack machine downstairs, which people touch after using the elevator. There could be spores on the lobby phone. There could be spores on the water fountain just down the hall from my office.
And although it sounds like I'm heading towards a reductio ad absurdum argument, I'm really not. When I say there could be, I mean yeah, there really could be. If I dwell on it, it becomes a very frightening thought.
But that also means that I can't take any comfort in wearing latex gloves. I could put a sealed plastic bag around the mail slot, wear a face mask to work, spray down my desk every morning with bleach, and it still wouldn't make a substantial difference. I can't arbitrarily pick a level of paranoia short of sealing myself in a hermetic bubble, and say, "Okay, THIS eases my anxiety enough to make the false sense of security worth it."
Instead, what I'm going to do is keep reminding myself that millions of parcels have gone through contaminated postal facilities every day for an entire month... and so far only 15 people have been infected. The chances of infection from an incidentally contaminated piece of mail are infinitesimal. No matter how cynical you are about the CDC, the facts continue to bear this out. People aren't getting anthrax because they're failing to take some precautionary measure that the government won't tell us about. They're getting anthrax because anthrax is hard to track, it gets everywhere, it slips through the cracks. You can't ward it off with rubber gloves.
But two people who caught it while working in rooms directly adjacent to mail-handling centers does not a rampaging contact-spread contagion make.
It doesn't mean I'm not scared. The fact that I'm writing something like this at all makes me very sad.
But I'm not going to start walling myself in. I won't do it. It won't help.
That's really the last I'll have to say on the matter.
My reasoning, though, goes something like this: everything I'm hearing from the CDC and the press, and everything I've managed to infer from the points where the CDC and the press are obviously wrong and/or hedging their bets, suggests to me that wearing gloves to touch my mail would be a thoroughly empty gesture.
If you accept that:
1) spores can infect a random piece of mail through incidental contact with another incidentally infected object, and that
2) those spores could conceivably infect you by the time they get to you,
then it must be obvious that latex gloves aren't going to do you a lick of good.
First, there is the obvious point that you could just as easily inhale the spores as get them on your skin. So make sure you buy a face mask while you're at the drugstore.
But it's more than that, really. Let's say I start wearing gloves to handle the mail that gets dropped in the mailbox every day. If I am seriously concerned about the spores that could conceivably be stuck to the mail, it would be idiotic for us to not also be concerned about the spores that could conceivably be stuck to the mailbox itself; and any area around it, including my door and entryway. There's no necessary limit to the number of incidental contact-based infections that could occur before the chance of transmission becomes nil; you've already accepted that an arbitrary number got the spores as far as your doorstep, so it would be foolish not to assume that an arbitrary number more could still occur.
If there could be spores in your mail, and if incidental contact is a reliable vector, then there could be spores already anywhere in your house. There could be spores in your kitchen. There could be spores on your clothes. There could be spores on my clothes when I come to visit you. There could very well be spores in the mailroom at work, which means there could be spores on the elevator button that the mail guy pushes when he comes to deliver the mail. There could be spores on the snack machine downstairs, which people touch after using the elevator. There could be spores on the lobby phone. There could be spores on the water fountain just down the hall from my office.
And although it sounds like I'm heading towards a reductio ad absurdum argument, I'm really not. When I say there could be, I mean yeah, there really could be. If I dwell on it, it becomes a very frightening thought.
But that also means that I can't take any comfort in wearing latex gloves. I could put a sealed plastic bag around the mail slot, wear a face mask to work, spray down my desk every morning with bleach, and it still wouldn't make a substantial difference. I can't arbitrarily pick a level of paranoia short of sealing myself in a hermetic bubble, and say, "Okay, THIS eases my anxiety enough to make the false sense of security worth it."
Instead, what I'm going to do is keep reminding myself that millions of parcels have gone through contaminated postal facilities every day for an entire month... and so far only 15 people have been infected. The chances of infection from an incidentally contaminated piece of mail are infinitesimal. No matter how cynical you are about the CDC, the facts continue to bear this out. People aren't getting anthrax because they're failing to take some precautionary measure that the government won't tell us about. They're getting anthrax because anthrax is hard to track, it gets everywhere, it slips through the cracks. You can't ward it off with rubber gloves.
But two people who caught it while working in rooms directly adjacent to mail-handling centers does not a rampaging contact-spread contagion make.
It doesn't mean I'm not scared. The fact that I'm writing something like this at all makes me very sad.
But I'm not going to start walling myself in. I won't do it. It won't help.
That's really the last I'll have to say on the matter.
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no subject
Date: 2001-10-31 08:01 am (UTC)What they did for our local news was the following:
Got some flourescent orange powder that glows under blacklight and was about 35-40 microns in size. They called several envelope makers and found out that most paper has pores in the size of 100 microns. They then took a letter, sealed it with powder in an average envelope like you would any letter. Dropped it in a mail container with other letter envelopes in it and shook the container for a minute. They didn't handle or physically bash the envelope around.
Then they used blacklight to see where the powder went. Some envelopes had no traces, others had QUITE a bit of powder on them, some only had it on the endges, some had it ALL over (they were not the original envelope.) And the original envelope had powder all over the outside of it as well which had leaked.
So what is one to do? The only precaution I've taken is thatI put a cardboard box for the mail to drop into in our house and I examine it out of that box, save only required bills (which go in the bill files,) and then wash my hands for 3 minutes after handling them. Why? Because I don't want to accidentally contaminate my birds or my mom (who has a depressed immune system.) If it was just me that lived here, I wouldn't bother to do that. But I am concerned about my mom and my birds. (Birds have a VERY efficient air sac/breathing system and are way more sensitive to odors and air born contaminants than mammals. And although in nature they would not be affected by anthrax, vets are honestly not sure if/how they could be affected by this bacteria (and they are suseptible to a lot of bacteria species,) in a captive situation with 'above average' exposure.)
The rest of the mail is put in the garage immediately, in a brown paper bag to be recycled. Normally I'd have left magazines in the house or lying around or in bags in the house and such, but not since the anthrax thing happened. Again, I could really care less about me. :) But I'm very careful around the house to begin with because of my mom's depressed immune system. And the birds.
no subject
Date: 2001-10-31 04:11 pm (UTC)but i really feel for those who have been affected. it's horrible.