  A calculation of thermal gluon decay shows that this process contributes
significantly to strangeness production in a quark-gluon plasma. Our analysis
does not support recent claims that this is the dominant process. In our
calculations we take into account the resummed form of the transverse and
longitudinal parts of the gluon propagator following the Braaten-Pisarski
method. Our results are subject to the uncertainty concerning the estimate of
the damping rate entering the effective gluon propagator.
