The cross sections of absorption by and mesons are evaluated in a meson-exchange model. Including form factors with a cutoff parameter of 1 or 2 GeV, we find that due to the large threshold of these reactions the thermal average of their cross sections is only about 0.2 mb at a temperature of 150 MeV. Our results thus suggest that the absorption of directly produced by hadronic comovers in high energy heavy ion collisions is unimportant. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V.
