By Marilyn Odendahl, Truth Staff
modendahl@etruth.com
ELKHART -- Thwarting a bioterrorism attack sent through the postal service could be as simple as closing the door, turning the latch, pushing two buttons and waiting about 45 minutes.
The Mail Defender III, a 375-pound machine that can easily fit into the back of a Hummer, uses three types of energy to kill biological pathogens, like anthrax and the smallpox virus, which can be sprinkled into an envelope or small package and mailed to an unsuspecting office or agency. While the dangerous elements are zapped at 150 degrees Celsius (302 degrees Fahrenheit), the letters, documents, photographs or magazines are not harmed.
"It's easier than a microwave," said Patrick Heller, product design engineer and founder of ThermoDyne.
Seven years ago, Boston-based BioDefense Corp. called upon ThermoDyne to help develop the Mail Defender. On Tuesday, elected officials and executives from both companies gathered at the ThermoDyne plant on Middlebury Street to show off the device. The Elkhart manufacturer makes high-performance thermal insulation and often designs how it will be used in specialized projects. With large corporations as well as government organizations as customers, its insulation has been wrapped around jet engines, fuel cells in submarines and flight data recorders.
For the Mail Defender, the company formulated an insulation that enabled the machine to heat the mail evenly and quickly but still keeps the energy consumption low, Heller said.
BioDefense is optimistic the unit will find a big market. In particular, a federal mandate issued in 2003 took effect Tuesday and requires all federal buildings to develop plans to protect occupants against bioterrorism attacks. The Mail Defender already is being used by the departments of defense and justice as well as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and in the United Nations building, said Paul Jurberg, senior vice president of sales and marketing at BioDefense. The manufacturer is in talks with other government agencies.
Michael Lu, chairman and chief executive officer of BioDefense, began working on the Mail Defender shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He was scheduled to attend a meeting at 9 a.m. on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower but because his flight out of Boston was delayed, he was not in the building when the planes hit.
Inspired to do something to help, Lu left his New York City hotel room, bought a couple of microwaves at Walmart and started building the mail sterilizer.
The machine combines ultraviolet, microwave and high-frequency energy to neutralize dangerous pathogens. Describing it as a complex piece of equipment, Gregg Mosley, president of Biotest Laboratories in Minneapolis, said initially the unit was leaving cool spots in the pieces of mail much like a microwave oven can do when warming a dinner. Unheated areas could enable the biological agents to survive. ThermoDyne helped engineer the system to uniformly heat all the mail that is placed inside the device's heavy internal core.
BioDefense and ThermoDyne are finalizing a partnership agreement. John Meyer, president of BioDefense, is confident the deal will be signed and the Boston company will be doing business with the Elkhart manufacturer for "a long, long time."
If the Mail Defender, which has a current price tag of $89,000 per unit, is placed in every one of the 9,000 federal buildings, BioDefense officials anticipate the project could generate $72 billion in revenue. Although that could mean hundreds of new jobs for Elkhart, Heller tempered the employment prediction by noting the jobs will be very slow in coming.
Speaking Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd, called the Mail Defender a "giant step" in the battle against terrorism. The Republican leader of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism said the device will allow federal agencies and private companies to eradicate biological threats and not fall prey to hoaxes.
"It's the simplest way," Souder said of the Mail Defender. "Whack it out, then you can figure it out later what was trying to kill you."