Photo: Eden, Janine and Jim. Flickr/CC
They never did catch that anthrax guy.
But Boston-based BioDefense Corp. has a $90,000 front-loading scrubber for suspicious mail, which pelts postage with a mix of microwaves and broad-spectrum light beams.
ATF and FBI are BioDefense customers. So is the United Nations in New York, where five UN missions on Monday received white powder letters.
Currently, the MailDefender is designed to neutralize any bio-agents inside any of the envelopes placed in the basket, but the device does not contain any detection or alert system that would notify the operator that a bio-agent had, in fact, been discovered. BioDefense says it hopes to add such a detection and alerting feature in the near future.