Follow me on this one.

It seems as if the original anthrax letters did cross contaminate postal machinery, possibly infecting other mail and distributing anthrax spores across the United States.  THIS IS NOT NECESSARILY A BAD THING.

As the spores are passed from letter to letter, they become fewer in quantity.  So much so as to make them "clinically insignificant," which means not likely to cause infection.  But what they do DO however is elicit an immune response in the individual exposed.  It's like getting a vaccination by mail.

Even if a person IS infected, more often than not it will be the cutaneous (skin) version of anthrax which is extremely easy to treat and the inoculation will last a lifetime.  Kinda like getting the chicken pox.

It's ironic that what these terrorist might end up doing is not causing a widespread epidemic and panic, but rather help inoculate the American people against the very agent they tried to kill us with.

Pretty strange. [BD]