AFF/TERRORISM/BIOTERRORISM

ANTHRAX ATTACK WILL HAVE HUGE IMPACTS

ANTHRAX ATTACK ON WASHINGTON WOULD KILL 1-3 MILLION

The worst case scenario - 220 pounds of anthrax spores released from a crop-duster over Washington D.C., on a calm clear night - could kill one million to three million people in the metropolitan area, according to the US Office of Technology Assessment. William Patrick, who served as a UN Inspector in Iraq, believes the scenario could take only 100 pounds of the agent.

ANTHRAX IS EASY TO MAKE, EASY TO USE, AND VERY DEADLY

St. Louis Post-Dispatch January 11, 2001, SECTION: NEWS, Pg. A5 HEADLINE: PENTAGON SAYS GERM WEAPONS COULD TARGET U.S. RANCHES, FARMS //VT2002acsln

Anthrax is considered the easiest germ weapon to make and use. When inhaled as tiny, dry particles, it can cause severe pneumonia and death within a week.

ANTHRAX ATTACK KILLING 95,000 IS CONSERVATIVE

MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, School of Public Health, Univ. of Minnesota, 2000; LIVING TERRORS: What America needs to know to survive the coming bioterrorist catastrophe //VT2002acs p. 74

According to estimates by the World Health Organization in a 1970 report, an anthrax attack releasing fifty kilograms of agent-about one hundred pounds-along a two-kilometer line upwind of a population center of 500,000 could lead to 95,000 deaths and 125,000 people incapacitated. Those chilling figures from a report thirty years old are still cited today, though Dr. Edward M. Eitzen, Jr., of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, says that "these estimates are conservative" when compared to the analysis of other experts.