Email answer to anthrax risk
Published: 17 Oct 2001 08:53 BST
Use of email could skyrocket as an ever-widening anthrax investigation turns "snail mail" into a suspicious and potentially lethal form of communication.
From corporations to government, executives and regulators concerned about the growing number of letters infected with the deadly bacterium are urging people to communicate through email instead of sending letters through the US Postal Service.
On Tuesday, the Arizona Daily Star announced that the Tucson newspaper would no longer accept regular postal mail addressed to "Letters to the Editor" and other popular feedback forums. Instead, editor and publisher Jane Amari told readers, the paper is asking people to send all correspondence by email, fax or through an online calendar.
"We realize that this policy will inconvenience some readers," Amari wrote in a bulletin. "But it seems a reasonable way to give employees who handle our mail a little more peace of mind."
Today more than half of all Americans use email, for an average of a half-hour each day, according to a recent report by Forrester Research. Another research company, Jupiter Media Metrix, predicts that by 2006, 140m Americans will be "active" email users, up from 87m this year.
The newspaper isn't the only organisation on heightened alert regarding mailroom workers and letter recipients. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) sent an email to members Monday urging the $528bn (£370bn) direct-mail industry to send email in conjunction with mass mailing campaigns.
Several years ago, direct mailers began sending email in tandem with letter drops as a way to target its most prized consumers and increase response rates. But a director for the trade organisation said Tuesday that the trend is likely to accelerate in wake of the anthrax scare. For instance, he said, marketers wishing to send consumers envelopes containing coupons or sale notifications should also send email to warn consumers that such offers are about to hit their doorstep.
"This is not something that we just thought up Tuesday," said Lou Mastria, director of public and international affairs for the New York-based DMA, the oldest and largest trade association for users and suppliers in the direct, database and interactive marketing fields. "This is a practice that's been developing for some time...It increases response rates normally, but it's particularly effective in this kind of environment, when people are concerned about their mail.
"If people can be reassured and think, 'Hey, this is a legitimate company taking time to send me an email about something that's coming in the mail,' then I'm a little less leery about opening the envelope."
Congress is also urging constituents to communicate with politicians via email instead of regular mail. On Monday, a piece of mail sent to the office of Sen. Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, tested positive for anthrax.
His office was immediately quarantined, and office workers were instructed to stop opening mail. Later Monday, Senator Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat, told CNN that Congress is asking constituents to communicate with their senators or representatives through electronic means.
"We have in our office stopped opening mail, but people can still...communicate with their senator or congressman by email or by phone," Cleland said on CNN.
America's fears about anthrax-contaminated mail began 4 October, when officials in Boca Raton, Florida, announced that American Media Photo Editor Robert Stevens inhaled a form of anthrax. Stevens died a day later.
Over the next two weeks, numerous letters containing spores of anthrax--an infectious, often fatal disease that can be transmitted from cattle and sheep to humans through inhalation or skin lesions--arrived at NBC Nightly News, ABC News, Microsoft and Daschle's Washington office.
Although investigators originally believed that the American Media letter was an isolated incident, they have since begun to speculate whether the letters are part of a larger bioterrorism campaign, possibly linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network. The Afghanistan-based organisation and its Saudi-born leader are considered prime suspects behind the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
On Monday, President Bush emphasised that he had "no hard data yet" linking the anthrax exposures and bin Laden. But he quickly noted that bin Laden "is an evil man" and that "he and his spokesmen are openly bragging about how they hope to inflict more pain on our country."
"I wouldn't put it past him, but we don't have any hard evidence," Bush said to a group of reporters in Washington.
The anthrax threats are likely to slow the delivery of regular mail--at least to certain organisations.
The DMA, in its email to mailers, urged companies to postpone business-to-business mail to corporations because of expected backlogs in mailrooms caused by increased security. Senate Sergeant at Arms Alfonso Lenhardt unveiled new procedures last week so that the Senate could check all incoming mail "for potentially harmful agents," according to a memo Lenhardt wrote. The new procedures come on top of X-ray machines that have long been in place.
The letter to Daschle--and at least a dozen suspicious letters to congressional offices that have not yet been tested--prompted a halt of all mail deliveries in the Capitol this week.
"Even though all mail is undergoing additional security screening, please pay attention to all mail delivered to your office, particularly heavily taped mail," Representative Martin Frost of Texas, a House Democratic leader, wrote in an email to Congress members.
Senator Frank Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, also said Monday that his aides received a suspicious letter. When the aides reported the letter to investigators, Murkowski said, Capitol police told them that their report was the 12th of the day.
In Trenton, New Jersey, postal inspector Tony Esposito confirmed that the letter to Daschle was postmarked in Trenton on 18 September--the same date and postmark on a letter that infected an NBC employee in New York. Other suspicious letters, including those that have not been confirmed as testing positive, have been postmarked from Malaysia, Florida and other states.
The scare was enough to prompt a major change at the Tucson newspaper, where editors said they tried to balance the concerns of mailroom and other workers with readers' ability to communicate. Many letters that have tested positive for anthrax were sent to media organisations, including American Media, which publishes supermarket tabloids, and TV networks NBC and ABC.
Bobbie Jo Buel, the Arizona Daily Star's managing editor, noted that at least 60 percent of all reader submissions already come electronically, either by fax or email. She hoped that the new policy wouldn't crimp readers' ability to communicate with staffers.
"You feel like you're giving in to terrorists if you change the way you do things dramatically, but you have to also think about your employees and protecting them. We have a lot of employees who handle the mail," Buel said Tuesday. "I don't think anyone's going to send us anthrax, but when you work on the media, you know that all sorts of crazy and deranged people are sending you things all the time."
The scare is another blow to the US Postal Service, which has been battling a worrying decline in first-class mail deliveries because of the Internet, email and electronic bill payment services. First-class mail accounted for about $31bn in the agency's revenues in 1999, a figure that is expected to be cut by more than half by 2003, according to the General Accounting Office.
The Postal Service delivers 680m pieces a day, totaling 208bn pieces of mail a year, Postmaster General John E. Potter said Monday.
Peter Neumann, principal scientist at SRI International Computer Science Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, agreed that email was a convenient, safe way to communicate in case of a broader bioterrorist threat. But he hoped that people wouldn't become paranoid about regular mail and would continue to look for new threats.
"You have to remember that we tend to respond so narrowly just to the threat of the day," Neumann said. "For a while it was airliners used as cruise missiles. Then it was realised that civil aviation was also riskful. Then anthrax. There are many other modalities that have not yet come into play but that we need to be aware of and on guard."
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