Why the concern today over the new wave of bio-terrorism and biological weaponry?
Bio-terrorism is both a very old and a very new situation. It’s very old in that it’s been used for centuries in very crude and most often very inefficient ways. Today, what we have is a very different situation. We have for the first time terrorists in a number of different forms who want to cause terror. Number two, we have infectious agents, and our ability to grow them in quantities that we never had before, that make them very efficient and effective killers. And we now have the devices that make it very easy to fill a subway or a large building or, for that matter, fly over an entire community and expose millions and millions of people. That didn’t exist before now. Let’s discuss what some of the agents are, what symptoms they cause, and why that makes them a great weapon. First, smallpox. Smallpox is caused by a virus that has not circulated in the human population for more than 20 years. About a third of the people who contract it will die. Today, most of the world’s population
