Nothing is Sacred!

[--Pete]

Hi,

The fact is that obtaining anthrax is so difficult that the only suspects can be mad scientists.

Not really. It would appear that anthrax is relatively common. Anyone who paid attention in high school biology should have little trouble collecting some and growing a few petri dishes of the stuff. Letting it dry out should be sufficient to form the spores. Now, getting the lethal strains might be harder. And 'weaponizing' it would require a good lab and advanced knowledge. But just getting bacillus anthracis (or yersinia pestis or mycobacterium tuberculosis or any number of other nasties) would really not be that hard to do.

If shutting down a building for a day doesn't cost anything I would agree with you but if people start mailing powder letters around every day, the costs would be so huge that you could raise the wealth of several African countries to first world standards, and paying for the new Obama health care bill.

Schools and universities have gotten a lot of bomb threats, especially around exam times. I never heard that the costs were a major item. Probably cheaper than labor disputes and weeks long strikes.

Plus, if you are a real terrorist and not a mad scientist you don't mail anthrax but you hide it in an office building giving the disease time to spread.

Since anthrax has a short life in the open except in spore form, and spore form is inert, it wouldn't too much good to give it time to spread.

--Pete