Article Three 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 _______________________________________________________ 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: [email protected] -or- [email protected] with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the SUBJECT line. To post, address your message to: [email protected] Silver-list archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
