NTI newswire picked up an article about an exercise featuring a bioterrorism attack using botulinum toxin in the milk supply. Oy, this again. The idea was published in this paper in PNAS in 2005, and it apparently riled HHS enough to write a letter asking that it not be published because it was too detailed on vulnerabilities. The publishers went ahead anyway.
Ok, it’s not that someone sneaking toxins into your milk is not a threat to some degree. But how big a threat is it, really? There comes a point when you have to say, what’s not a threat? You can red team terrorist attack scenarios to death, there’s no end to the exciting ideas you can come up with. You can analyze them and publish papers about them. It doesn’t mean any terrorist will choose your scenario just because it can be done. Vulnerability is everywhere, in every type of critical industry and infrastructure. If you’re breathing right now you’re at some risk that terrorists will nuke your neighborhood (if you notice a nuclear blast, visit ready.gov and get instructions to run around the corner).
Anyway, Milton Leitenberg (ever the bioterrorism skeptic) and George Smith wrote a brief rebuttal of the paper. There are easier things to do than crank out your own bot tox, and if you finally succeed, it doesn’t take that much heat to wreck your precious poison. Like, as in pasteurization.
Oh, and when you think about it, what are a couple of social scientists of some sort (Wein and Liu, the authors, work in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering) doing making up bioterrorism scenarios in the first place? Getting the government all spun up, I guess. Let’s get over this already.
Filed under: biological weapons, terrorism
