While the public health response later included the letter traceback through the entire postal system, including identification and prophylaxis of at-risk USPS employees (12), we limit our discussion to Capitol Hill.
Although its incidence in developed countries has been very low owing to improvements in animal husbandry and handling of animal products, anthrax captured attention after October 2001 because of bioterrorism attack through the United States postal system and the subsequent identification of anthrax in 22 patients, including 11 with cutaneous disease [ 6, 17, 18].
The first step is sampling of the eligible people within the CNAV database (see below); after sampling, identification data (names, postal addresses, telephone numbers) are encrypted and kept by a thrusted third party, an independent organization in charge of sending the invitations to participate to CONSTANCES; thus only a study number is stored in the central CONSTANCES database.
For each hospital admission a new record is created in the hospital register, including the following information: date of birth, gender, numeric part of postal code, hospital-specific patient identification code, type of hospital, admission date and principal and secondary diagnoses of the admission.
Therefore, whether a three character postal code represents acceptable re-identification risk or not will depend on what are the other quasi-identifiers that are disclosed: it is not possible to make a meaningful risk assessment by considering only the postal code if there are other quasi-identifiers in the data set.
A small number of holdings shared the same postal code and had no other identification.
These admissions were linked to the cohort of 23,172 patients with linkage variables 'date of birth', 'gender' and one or both of the variables 'numerical part of postal code' and 'hospital-specific patient identification code'.
Shot in an eerie, flat style, the black-and-white documentary showed the brilliant Firestone in a variety of situations, including the mail room where she worked, pontificating on her identification with the black male postal workers.
These were tumour identification code, number of tumours, postal district, and a variable indicating whether the tumour was registered in two registries.
Whenever possible, data collection should include small-area markers (such as postal codes) or identifiers (such as personal identification numbers) that permit linkages between data sources.
