Bioterrorism Essay

How Bioterrorism can exploit the air we breathe to spread infectious diseases.

Terrorism is an unfortunate criminal act in which we have had to deal with for many years, the earliest known act of using an infectious disease in the case of terrorist act dates back to 600bc (Riedel, 2004). Bioterrorism is a form of terrorism which uses biological agencies to induce wide spread fear, illness and in some cases death. There are many ways to releases a biological agent into the general public, the main three being water, food and air. These are usually released on a large scale such as a chain of restaurant or a train or a sewage cleaning centre. In this paper I shall be talking about the usage of air as a way of releasing a pathological agent into

Bioterrorism hasn’t always been taken seriously but since an accidental release of aerosolized anthrax from a bioweapons lab in Russia back in 1979, this caused countries like the United States to become more wary about the risk of bioweapons and bioterrorism

The way in which the disease was spread so widely was the usage of post and letters the sports of B.anthracis were placed into the parcels and envelopes so when the targets were to open their mail they would unexpectedly inhale the spores and succumb to the spores and have anthrax (Jernigan et al., 2001). Anthrax is very serious infectious disease which when inhaled can cause nausea, coughing, fever and other flulike symptoms which cause it to be difficult to diagnose, thankfully anthrax is not spread from human to human however which means it cannot spread as much as influenza does(Bell, Kozarsky, and Stephens, 2002). Five people died from this attack out of the 11 infected people that is a 45% mortality rate (Fennelly et al., 2004), if this attack was more wide spread there was a potential for millions of people to be targeted and even killed so it is important that prevention and detection for these attacks are widely available and are fast