Office of Patent Legal Adminstration << Pre-OG Notices << Notice Concerning Safety of USPTO Mailings

In response to inquiries that the Office has received from its customers, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has obtained reassurance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) about the safety of mailings from the USPTO. Some parties have expressed concern because some mail from the USPTO was in the past routed through the U.S. Postal Service’s Brentwood Sorting Station in Washington, D.C., where workers are diagnosed as having contracted anthrax. Most outgoing correspondence from the USPTO did, through Friday, October 19, 2001, pass through the Brentwood Sorting Station, but no outgoing trademark correspondence used that facility. The Office on October 22, 2001, contacted the CDC. The CDC advises us that it is highly unlikely that mail passing through the Brentwood postal facility was contaminated and poses any threat.

The Brentwood Station is now closed, and USPTO mailings, both incoming and outgoing, are currently being routed through another station.

In conveying this information, the USPTO does not of course intend to discourage its correspondents from undertaking any enhanced precautions in their mail operations that recent events may have led them to consider. The USPTO had itself, before the Brentwood incident, undertaken added training and safety measures in its mail operations. It appears, however, that the fact that our customers receive mailings from the USPTO should not provide a more particularized basis for health and safety concerns.