I have put three recent articles on this page from the media as they all relate to the same fact. The risk from anthrax is highly overstated. Despite the recent cases of anthrax in the media.

To make anthrax into a weapon, as these articles describe, that would kill millions would require technology and sophistication that is far beyond the capability of bin Laden.

Making A Weapon From Anthrax

The hurdles to making anthrax weapons include getting the right strain, or subspecies, of the germ. Experts say there are scores of strains of Bacillus anthracis, only some known to be exceptionally deadly.

Then a would-be biowarrior would have to brew up swarms of lethal microbes - a dangerous process - and coax the fragile rod-shaped bacteria into forming spores, the hardy, hardened, dormant state.

Then clumps of spores must be refined to precise specifications if they are to find their way into the human lung. Weapons experts say the particles must be one to five microns wide; 20 of them would line up across the stalk of a human hair.

Hugh-Jones, the anthrax expert at Louisiana State, said terrorists could not simply open a jar of anthrax spores on a subway or sprinkle some spores around and infect thousands of people.

A person must inhale about 8,000 to 10,000 spores to be infected, Hugh-Jones said. And, he added, "getting an efficient aerosol is a lot of work - you can't just pump it up in an aerosol can."

Anthrax spores, Hugh-Jones explained, tend to clump together in pieces so big that they would be taken up by the body's defenses in the passageways to the lungs. To make the spores into a deadly power, "you've got to have a very very fine particle size," Hugh-Jones said. To make that powder, he said, "you have to use detergents," to break up the clumps. "It's a professional weapon - it's not for the amateur," he said.

For instance, commercial crop-dusters usually dispense liquids, and their nozzles produce droplets far too large for sailing deep into human lungs. A terrorist would have to do major modifications to adapt the sprayer's nozzles to produce a finer mist of particles.

Problems with nozzle design were among the factors that troubled Iraq's anthrax efforts, Spertzel said.

Experts say dry anthrax is even more difficult to make than wet anthrax, but more efficient for attacks because it can sail farther on the wind.

Because all anthrax spores are vulnerable to bright sunlight, they would ideally be dispersed at night, when the logistics of aerial strikes can be complex, experts say. Even then, an attack can fail if the weather is bad or if the spores are caught up in the rising air currents often produced by the relative warmth of urban areas.

"People don't understand how difficult it is to pull off a biological attack," said David R. Franz, a former top official in the Army's germ-defense program and now an officer at the Southern Research Institute, an arm of the University of Alabama.

New York Times October 12, 2001

Bioterrorism Risk May Be Overstated

Fear of biological attack has stirred memories of the sinister history of the remote Scottish island of Gruinard, where an anthrax bomb was exploded during World War II.

Now dubbed "anthrax island," Gruinard was requisitioned by the British military for secret tests to find out the potential of anthrax weapons following fears that Germany was developing a biological warfare capability.

Explosives testing with anthrax spores took place on the deserted island in the early 1940s, killing 50 sheep and leaving the island so contaminated it remained a no-go area for over 45 years.

Constant spraying with a mixture of 280 tons of formaldehyde and 2,000 tons of sea water was needed before Gruinard was finally declared decontaminated in 1987. Even today, 60 years on, it remains largely uninhabited.

The experiment did not persuade the British war cabinet to develop anthrax as a biological weapon, possibly because its use was too gruesome to contemplate, or possibly because the experiment showed the difficulties of delivering the agent with any accuracy or guarantee of effectiveness.

There is no doubt that anthrax -- delivered in the right way -- is potentially a mass killer. A 1993 report by the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimated that between 130,000 and 3 million deaths could follow the aerosol release of 100 kilograms of anthrax spores upwind of Washington, DC.

However, a review published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1999 by the US Working Group on Civilian BioDefense stated that most experts agree that:

the manufacture of a lethal anthrax aerosol "is beyond the capacity of individuals or groups without access to advanced biotechnology."

It points out that although the group responsible for releasing the nerve agent sarin in a subway station in Tokyo in 1995 dispersed aerosols of anthrax and botulism throughout Tokyo on at least eight occasions, for unclear reasons these attacks failed to produce illness.

Paradoxically, it was the accidental, rather than offensive, aerosolized release of anthrax spores from a military microbiology facility in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) in the former Soviet Union in 1979 which most clearly demonstrates the agent's lethal potential. Of 79 people reportedly infected, 68 died.

Yet even this incident may offer some reassurance, given that the military facility reportedly employed 15,000 people and that a residential area housing many thousands more was exposed to the aerosol.

Underlining the importance of early diagnosis, the JAMA article reported: The first evidence of a clandestine release of anthrax as a biological weapon most likely will be patients seeking medical treatment for symptoms of inhalational anthrax.

The sudden appearance of a large number of patients in a city or region with an acute-onset flu-like illness and case fatality rates of 80% or more, with nearly half of all deaths occurring within 24 to 48 hours, is highly likely to be anthrax or pneumonic plague.

It adds that vaccine supplies are limited and that even if vaccine were available, population-wide vaccination "would not be recommended at this time, given the costs and logistics of a large-scale vaccination program and the unlikely occurrence of a bioterrorist attack in any given community."

The Journal of the American Medical Association 1999;281:1735-1745

US Public Overreacting to Bioterror Threat

A bioterrorism expert told a House Committee October 10 that bad information has led to an unreasonable level of panic about the probability of a bioweapons attack.

"Despite what you may have heard in recent weeks, there are meaningful technical hurdles that stand between this nation's citizens and the ability of terrorist groups to engage in mass casualty attacks with chemical and biological agents," Dr. Amy Smithson, director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation project at the Henry Stimson Center, told the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight subcommittee.

"Facts often get overlooked in such an atmosphere, but I will resort to them nonetheless," Smithson told the subcommittee. For example, she said, while crop-dusting planes normally dispense materials that are 100 microns in size or larger, "in order for an aerosol spray of biological agent to infect a person, the agent must arrive in the human lung alive, in a 1 to 10 micron particle size."

Smithson said the Florida anthrax situation is also not likely a terrorist event. In any case, she said, "rubbing some anthrax on a (computer) keyboard is not a mass casualty attempt."

Reuters Washington, October 10, 2001