BioTerrorism

Hi all, I just got done with a rather massive grant on prevention of bioterrorism and it has started me thinking. Not so much about the prevention and treatment, I have thought about that enough for a while , but about how such an attack would actually be initiated. I have also been considering the difficulties and the lack thereof of initiating such an attack. Based on standard epidemiology, the lifecycles of organisms such as smallpox, monkeypox, Y. pestis, etc. I am curious as to other peoples ideas on: 1) the likelyhood of such an attack and 2) the effectiveness.And no I am not worried about Ashcroft and his secret police coming after me for writing about this online, they already know what I am doing as I have been talking to groups like the CDC and the FDA about it for months. And no, for those in the field and interested, I can not discuss the grant online.

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz

I'd say that one way to initiate a catastrophic attack on many of the developed world's cities would be to release select gases in large quantities. These gases could be chosen to destabilize the current energy balance of the surface of the earth leading to higher average temperatures, melting ice and raising sea levels. This would obliterate most of Florida, perhaps Manhatten, LA, parts of San Franciso, all of Holland etc.Now, [i]that's[/] terrorism on a truely grand scale!

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Common sense isn't

Interesting, terrorism by warm gas .Actually I did have some discusions with people w.r.t. nerve agents and modified Y. pestis. The one that scared me the most was some of the info concerning S. African bioweapons labs. Those guys should have been shot.

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz

I am curious about the events surrounding 9-11 which is of course impossible to really search through.I heard that there was an enormous amount of resources supposedly employed in getting the terrorists into the U.S. and then training them. Is this actually the case?

Well, first of all, I do not have that much more info on this than anyone else. By prevent I was refering to things such as vaccines. Sorry if my wording was imprecise.My opinion is that it depends on what you mean by enormous. From the viewpoint of someone who has co-ordinated projects accross multple people and groups in widely separated areas it can be both money and time consuming. But the terrorists had access to both. THere is also some info that they have sufficient info to pose a bio-terrorism threat, the biggest problem in this area is for it to hit enough people to make a big enough impact. That is actually a significant problem, at least from their point of view.

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz