Return to Virginia Business - January 2002

Mail room gizmo can filter away anthrax

It used to be that getting an unexpected parcel in the mail was a pleasant surprise. Not anymore, especially after deadly anthrax has been found in letters mailed to Washington, D.C., New York, Florida, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Yet a Midlothian-based company may have a solution for apprehensive mail room workers. Technovation Systems Inc., a long-time manufacturer of clean rooms for the military and pharmaceutical companies, has used its existing filter system to develop the Mail Opening Air Flow Bench.

The bench works like this: a gloved operator sits in front of the bench and opens mail inside it. A filtered air stream enters the bench and carries away fine powders that may have been distributed in the air when the mail was opened. Depending on size, the units range from $5,000 to $13,500. The bench is available in four sizes ranging from 2.5 feet wide to 8 feet wide.

Although the units won't remove gaseous agents, the benches can effectively filter out 99.99 percent of all sub-micron particles, such as anthrax spores. "We don't know if there's a real market for it [yet]," says Rajan Jaisinghani, president of Technovation. But he says it's a start in combating the nation's fear about bioterrorism.

Technovation is no ambulance chaser, however. It first ventured into the filtering business a few years ago when the U.S. Army asked the company for help in improving its existing Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare Protection system. So Technovation developed the clean room, which is used for everything from manufacturing computer chips to doing pharmaceutical work.

The company was approached by Boeing Co. with the idea of developing a contraption to safely open mail. "We would never even have imagined to do this. Boeing Co. asked if we could do something similar [to the clean room] but applied to opening mail," Jaisinghani says.

Will the bench make everyone safe? Jaisinghani, whose background is in aerosol science, says scientists don't have all the answers to anthrax or other microbe threats. But he says it's likely that some of the recent anthrax spores that contaminated U.S. Senate workers managed to get through building ventilation systems - a feat thought impossible before. His contraption might help.

- Leila Marija Ugincius