Look­ing for some scary ways to kill peo­ple (or cities, or coun­tries?) Denene Lofland pre­sented a fas­ci­nat­ing hour on bioter­ror­ism. For thriller writ­ers, I’m sure it was a gold mine.

Bioter­ror­ism is defined as the “unlaw­ful use, or threat­ened use, of microor­gan­isms or tox­ins derived from liv­ing organ­isms, to pro­duce death or dis­ease in humans, ani­mals, or plants.” What bioter­ror­ists are really try­ing to do is cre­ate fear.

Bioter­ror­ist attacks can be Overt—with imme­di­ate impact, but early recog­ni­tion is more likely. Covert acts have delayed responses, and are rec­og­nized clinically.

I found it intrigu­ing to learn that the first attack of bioter­ror­ism was in 600 BC. Vil­lagers noticed that dis­eased rye pro­duced an hal­lu­cino­gen with effects sim­i­lar to LSD (not that they knew that!). They poi­soned the water sup­ply of neigh­bor­ing villages.

In WWI, Bacil­lus anthracis (anthrax) and Pseudomonas mallei were used to poi­son live­stock. In 1984, in Ore­gon, sal­mo­nella was used in a restau­rant in an attempt to make peo­ple sick so they wouldn’t be able to vote, thus fix­ing an election.

In 2001, in New York and Florida, spores of the anthrax bacil­lus were enclosed in letters.

Denene con­tin­ued by telling us that anthrax is cheap rel­a­tive to other weapons, and will pro­duce about a 50% casu­alty rate in one square kilo­me­ter. She cited 1971 fig­ures com­par­ing the cost of anthrax to other weapons. Con­ven­tional poi­sons would be about $2000, nuclear weapons would be $800,000, Chem­i­cal war­fare, about $600,000 and anthrax—one thou­sand. (I’m rely­ing on my notes here, and can’t be 100% sure these fig­ures are totally accu­rate, but it’s the scale that matters—I’d have Googled it, but I don’t want the FBI com­ing after me)

Anthrax is a weapon of choice because the ini­tial out­break is smaller, so it’s not as obvi­ous that peo­ple are infected. Then, they infect oth­ers, and so on and so on. She explained that it can be either a liq­uid or a pow­der, so aerosols can be cre­ated. Weather is a key fac­tor when using this method, how­ever. Don’t want to be down­wind when you’re spray­ing. It can also be admin­is­tered orally through food or water contamination.

Deliv­ery sys­tems include the mail (spores in envelopes), food, water, sprayers—aircraft, vehi­cles, or by hand. In Florida, mos­quito con­trol planes flew over­head spray­ing insecticides—but what if some­one got anthrax into the mix? Or the gar­dener spray­ing your rose­bushes? Or into an air han­dling sys­tem in a large build­ing, or mall? There are also human and ani­mal vectors—those with the dis­ease spread­ing it to others.

So, how are we pro­tected? There are detec­tion sys­tems, where sam­ples are col­lected and iden­ti­fied. BioWatch was cre­ated in 2001 after the let­ters with anthrax spore were dis­cov­ered. You can find more about BioWatch here, for starters. There’s also a com­pany called MESO Sys­tems in Albu­querque that makes devices to col­lect and sam­ple the air. Sam­ples are tested for specifics, so you have to have an idea what you’re look­ing for, and then you can start nar­row­ing things down. There’s a Lab­o­ra­tory Response Net­work that keeps researches up to speed.

And, lastly, she left us with infor­ma­tion from the CDC web­site, which cat­e­go­rizes bioter­ror­ism agents. The worst, level A, are things like the plague. Next, level B are bac­te­ria like E, coli. Lastly, level C, are multi-drug resis­tant strains of tuberculosis.

She also showed us nifty slides of what lots of these lit­tle “bugs” looked like—but you had to be there.