U.S. Might Tap Mail Carriers for Anthrax Response

The Bush administration yesterday proposed recruiting U.S. postal workers to deliver protective antibiotics to tens of thousands of people if anthrax were released as a biological weapon (see GSN, Sept. 25, 2007).

The Health and Human Services Department said in a statement that postal employees could be offered advance supplies of antibiotics for themselves and their families in exchange for volunteering to distribute the drugs in an attack, the Washington Post reported today.  The carriers would be given police escorts as they drop off the drugs.

"We have found letter carriers to be the federal government's quickest and surest way of getting pills to whole communities," Health and Human Services Department Michael Leavitt said.

The Postal Service and its employee unions have endorsed the approach, department representatives added.

During 2006 and 2007, the Postal Service conducted drug distribution drills in Boston, Seattle and Philadelphia, said William Raub, science adviser to Leavitt.  Over an eight-hour period last year, 50 postal workers with police escorts dropped off empty boxes at 55,000 Philadelphia residences, the Post said (see GSN, June 25, 2007).

The Postal Service plans to recruit roughly 700 postal employees next year for a trial run of the distribution program covering roughly a quarter of all residences in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., Raub said.  The workers would be medically vetted and then issued N95 face masks and packs of the antibiotic doxycycline to store for a potential attack.

If the program is deemed a success, it might be expanded to cover both Minnesota cities, Postal Service official Jude Plessas said.

However, Leavitt only yesterday asked the Food and Drug Administration to approve the doxycycline for use in the scheme.  The approval process could take months to complete, the Post reported.

The United States maintains sufficient antibiotics across 12 Strategic National Stockpile storage sites to protect 40 million people for 60 days.  A person exposed to inhaled anthrax would need treatment for no more than 60 days after the initial exposure, the Post said (David Brown, Washington Post, Oct. 2).

Meanwhile, Maryland-based Emergent BioSolutions has received a federal contract valued as high as $404 million to supply 14.5 million additional doses of its BioThrax anthrax vaccine for the U.S. stockpile, the Washington Business Journal reported yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 29).

The company plans to start work under the contract late next year, once it completes an existing order of 18.75 million vaccine doses, and complete the new order in late 2011 (Tucker Echols, Washington Business Journal, Oct. 1).

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