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If you didn’t get a chance to see it, there was a splendidly elegant demonstration of common sense by CNN Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta a couple days ago. As you know, the big question this week has been whether or how many Anthrax spores could spill out of an envelope on its way through the postal system. The reason for the screw-up (not meant flippantly, but what else to call it?) with the postal workers was that the folks at the CDC didn’t think Anthrax-tainted envelopes would ‘leak’ spores until they were opened.

Now, anyone who’s ever licked an envelope knows that envelopes DON’T SEAL. The sticky stuff that you lick ends more than a centimeter before the end of the flap. Sometimes there’s also a little gap in the sticky stuff between the two long slanted lines. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

So the intrepid Dr. Gupta fills an envelope with some talcum powder, seals it, and then pats it a few times. So what happens? $%&#’s pouring out of the thing! Out of the flaps. Even a bit through the paper itself. You name it, you got it.

So basically it’s pretty clear this Daschle Anthrax letter must have been leaving a trail of spores from Jersey to DC. And it’s not at all surprising that it spewed lots of spores when it got run through the sorting machine at the Brentwood facility in DC.

In any case, according to Dr. Gupta, the talcum particles are about 30 microns across. That’s compared to the Anthrax spores which were 5 microns and under. The kicker is that the pores in the envelope paper are about a 100 microns. So even if the envelope were “sealed,” the stuff could STILL come out without much difficulty.

If Gupta’s experiment weren’t so sad it almost would have been funny, because it showed how ridiculous the original assumption was.

The only question is why we had to wait for this dude from CNN to think of this. Isn’t this what we have those CDC guys for?

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