Mailmen Could Become Couriers for Anthrax Drugs in Emergency

Wall Street Journal Health Blog posted by Posted by Jacob Goldstein Say there’s an anthrax attack in a major U.S. city, and you want to get antibiotics to everybody in town. It’s a problem federal health officials have been trying to crack for years, and they think they’ve found an answer: The U.S. Postal Service. “We have found letter carriers to be the federal government’s quickest and surest way of getting pills to whole communities,” the blogger Mike Leavitt, who also runs the Department of Health and Human Services, tells the Washington Post. In a recent test of the distribution strategy, 50 mail carriers in Philly reached 55,000 households in less than eight hours, the Post says.

Postal Service

SUMMARY: A public hearing has been scheduled to receive additional testimony on the universal postal service obligation. Receipt of this testimony will assist the Commission in developing a formal report due later this year.

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``universal postal service and the postal monopoly in the United States * * * including the monopoly on the delivery of mail and on access to mailboxes.''