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Re: Dangers of sending plants through the mail.
>Last night on the news they were talking about possibly installing
>machines at the post offices in the US that would irradiate all the mail
>going through, to kill any Anthrax or other nasties. If it's enough to
>kill Anthrax, I can only imagine what it would do to fish or plants. :-(
>
>I just thought I'd let everybody know, to prevent any nasty suprises.
I somewhat doubt that this will happen. Remember that if it were to be
effective, the machines would have to be installed at ALL international
depots for ALL international carriers/curriers/shippers, of which there are
a lot. And there are a *lot* of private pilots that do international
flights too.
Even if they *do* install such devices (which, BTW, are already used to
treat certain kinds of grain to prevent sprouting), there will have to be
some kind of presumably extra-carefully-inspected bypass system. The reason
is that not only living things are detrimentally effected by radiation. A
few other examples are: magnetic data storage media, photographic film,
many sensitive chemicals, many large scale integration electronic circuits,
etc. You would probably have to mark the pack as livestock or something
siliar and it would be subjects to a different kind of inspection.
-Bill
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Waveform Technology
UNIX Systems Administrator