Dr. Mercola has some very good articles to give us perspective. I don't want to feed an OT thing for too long, but I perceive a lot of fear in some of the List members posts.
Bioterrorism Risk May Be Overstated >From Dr. Mercola: 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. Article One 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 _______________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.ca address at http://mail.yahoo.ca -- The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. To join or quit silver-list or silver-digest send an e-mail message to: silver-list-requ...@eskimo.com -or- silver-digest-requ...@eskimo.com with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the SUBJECT line. To post, address your message to: silver-list@eskimo.com Silver-list archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <mdev...@eskimo.com>
