Dr. Meryl Nass was interviewed on one of our local talk radio programs yesterday. In that interview she said (bolding mine),
http://www.anthraxvaccine.org/recter.html
I really appreciate your consideration in avoiding stepping on my penis - Spiny Norman
Jeg elsker dig, Thomas
From Dr. Ness’s FAQ page:
I hope these facts help alleviate some of your fears.
Well sorry, but not really. That’s a good argument for why a crop-duster load of it might not kill a lot of people, but we are talking about putting a quantity in an envelope and shipping it to people. That brings the stuff right into your home, onto your hands, etc. And if you rip the end off the envelope and BLOW into it to expand it, you’ll get a faceful of spores.
So it requires tens of thousands or millions of spores to really make you sick… How much is that, in terms of volume? I gather that it’s not that much volume, because we know that a man DID in fact die after apparently handling an envelope that was dusted with it. So it’s not like you have to inhale a liter of the stuff. I’d guess that we’re talking on the order of micrograms here.
The question remains: If I take, say, 20 kilos of Anthrax, and I want to put enough into each envelope to give a reasonable chance of infecting someone (let’s say a 1/100 chance), how many envelopes can I fill with the stuff?
Am I being paranoid, or does this not sound like a dangerous vector method? Fill a million envelopes with spores, buy a mailing list of a million people, and mail them. Because Anthrax has a relatively long gestation period, by the time anyone gets sick the whole mailout will be at its destinations. You can even target specific groups by buying a targeted mailing list. You can hit 1 million Jews, or 1 million people who read a certain newspaper, etc. And it hits all over the country at the same time. How much terror would it instill in us to hear about 10,000 anthrax cases all over North America, in every single city?
If you want to get clever about it, you’ll print the envelopes using a program to generate random return addresses and fictitious company names, so that they can’t easily be identified. And you’ll send boxes of them out to operatives all over the place so that they aren’t all mailed from one spot.
This is one reason why I think this over-focus on airline safety is ridiculous. In a free society there will ALWAYS be ways that clever enemies can inflict massive casualties, given enough time and money and people.
Wow, I’ve never, ever, ever done that. Maybe a safe rule of thumb for all people would be to open their mail the normal way, i.e. by using a letter opener or simply tearing away the flap. 
I work for the post office, my job is to view images of mail that our computers can’t read and type in the address so that the bright orange bar code can be sprayed on the mail that tells the computers how to sort it. I’m certain that if there was a real, not just perceived, threat of Anthrax through the mail, the post office would have been alerted, and postal employees would know. If/when it is confirmed that this relatively isolated Anthrax incident was in fact caused by white powder sent through the USPS in a “love letter to J-Lo”, I am certain that the post office will have all of its employees on the highest alert for any suspicious-looking mail.
And I know the 800,000 USPS employees country-wide who are bored to death with their jobs would rise to the occasion to protect the country. We do, after all, have to take an oath to protect the United States when we’re hired.
Shh! You don’t want to be telling them how to do it!
To be honest, you’d be surprised how well postal employees know the addresses of other cities. I know in my line of work I see addresses from other places a lot more often than most, but I can usually recognise when an address is incorrect just by looking at it. I can list off a whole slew of mass-mailing addresses that I know from heart because none of them ever get their destinating addresses right and neither can they spell. (Ellinoy is not the appropriate meaning of IL, for example, but some seem to think it is.) In the 27 facilities nationwide that perform my line of work, fake mass-mailing return addresses would call some attention, and raise some red flags. I can’t speak for carriers and mail handlers but I’m certain that their jobs are just as boring, and thus their minds catalogue addresses just as well as mine is and mine does.
Assuming they were to use this tactic, we would have to further assume that they either had a large enough network in the United States to “send” these boxes of Anthrax letters via car/train/bus/airplane to their remote couriers, or that they were going to send the boxes of letters through the mail. If they do the former, well, yes, it would take us a while to catch on. However, if they did the latter, we could easily trace the mail back to an originating point.
Either way, there would probably be hundreds of ways we could identify Anthrax envelopes were the situation ever so serious. And I’m certain that if this particular Anthrax case in Florida is in fact linked to the mail, the USPS will be on its fullest alert to ensure that none of its carriers have to come into contact with it. If we have to X-ray scan every letter that goes through the post office to make sure there’s no weird “powder” in it, then I’m sure they’ll take that step, as I’m sure they have the capability. It’d just mean you’ll all get your mail a little later.
Meanwhile, don’t, um, blow into any envelopes from addresses you don’t trust, don’t sniff your mail, and most importantly, don’t contribute to a nationwide panic that is as of yet mostly unfounded.
Sam, blowing in an envelope may just be a peculiarity of yours and your family, and perhaps of some people you know. I’ve never in my 30 years seen a person blow into an envelope upon opening it. I’d never even heard of doing that until I read your post.
I’d consider that an extremely rare behavior, and not something that a bioterrorist can count on letter-openers doing.
Don’t you all wish you had taken the blue pill? 
Maybe blowing into the side of the envelope is an anachronism now or something, but I thought it was more widespread than that. You even used to see that method used in TV shows and stuff.
Maybe it’s because of an improvement in adhesives and such that has made it easier to open the flap on the envelope, so this method has become the norm?
Ask some older people, and I’ll bet that you’ll hear them say that they at least remember doing that in the good old days.
the last person I recall doing that was Carnac the Magnificent.
regarding the “over-focus on airline safety”, Sam Stone, I agree with your stance here & elsewhere that we can’t just fight the last war. But I don’t think the US is doing that. I’m seeing a very real focus on biohazards, security in ports, power plants, etc. But we also have to greatly increase airline security. Can you imagine if we didn’t - and 9/11 happened again?? Would you like to be the airline security director who tragically discovered a huge hole in his safety net, failed to close it and had to answer to relatives of victims of the 2nd round of suicide bombers?
maybe the next ones wouldn’t even be from Al Qaeda (who have moved onto something bigger & better), but were just copycats.
Yeah, I realize that. It’s one of the difficulties of fighting terrorism when you are a free society.
The real problem here is that there are many, many different threats, and not all of them have to be aimed at concentrations of power like nuclear plants and hydro dams. The anthrax-by-mail scheme is just one of them. There are so many more, it’s impossible to count them all, and certainly impossible to protect them all, especially if you widen the scope to include economic attacks.
This is the nature of an ‘asymmetrical threat’. How much money do you think American Media is going to lose because of the Anthrax scare? How many people will decide not to buy one of their tabloids next week, just in case?
And I keep hearing how Anthrax is not a threat if dropped by air over a city, because it’s hard to kill a lot of people that way. That may be, but what about the cleanup costs? Or the cost of evacuating a city? These guys can spend a thousand dollars and force us to spend 20 billion in result.
Remember the Tylenol murders? Remember how much economic havoc that caused for the makers of Tylenol?
Forget attacking a power plant - what if they just poison 2000 bottles of coke, and have agents in 20 cities each distribute 100 bottles of deadly pop randomly in supermarkets and convenience stores? Sure, they might only kill a few dozen people, but how much money would Coke lose, and every store that sells it? Would they have to pull every bottle of Coke in North America off the shelves?
And after that has died down, do it again only this time put some anthrax spores randomly in boxes of Tide. Inject it with a needle through the box, and it would be impossible to spot.
Take a suicide pilot, put him in a Cessna and crash him into some beloved monument, and you could cause the government to ground private pilots.
There are thousands of attacks like this that could cripple us economically, and put us in fear of every product around us.
This is the kind of stuff that’s worrying me lately.
While I agree that mail is not the most effective of delivery systems for anthrax, the threat of a lot of anthrax letters in the mail system could effectively shut down the postal system. This would have serious financial impacts to businesses all over the world. So while it might not really be that deadly, it could still be an effective terrorist tool.
I have a hard time believing that this is the work of terrorist though because I would think that they would have done one mass mailing and we would be hearing reports of hundreds or thousands of letters with mysterious powder all over them…
Terrorism is not very effective in onsie twosies.
I think I’d be a little bit more concerned about the possibility of terrorist Tylenol if there had ever been any indication that that was their style. As much as Israel is hated and as frequently as it is targeted by those guys, I don’t think anything like it has ever been attempted there. Stupid machismo (pardon the intercultural nonsequitur) is a much more their style. That’s probably the same reason we haven’t seen any Islamic Jihad cyberattacks.
And with all due respect to Gerald Posner–a man who’s due a lot of respect–I think I’d be a bit more worried about smallpox attacks if it was possible for anybody to get their hands on the smallpox virus. There’s a lot less smallpox virus out there than there is weapons-grade plutonium, and there’s no solid indication they’ve gotten ahold of anything nuclear.
You could make every single American terrified to open their mail while needing only a few teaspoons of anthrax.
Use some of the anthrax in a small, preliminary area. Preferably a building involved in large volumes of mail. Once the infections are verified and reported, the entire country knows that “anthrax by mail” is a real, serious threat.
Then put baking powder, or some other cheap and easily obtained powdery substance similar to anthrax, in hundreds of thousands of envelopes. Put the rest of the anthrax in, say, every 500th envelope. Make the envelopes as professional and convincingly innocuous in appearance as possible. Mail them to random (but verified) addresses all over the country.
Within a week there would be hundreds of thousands of reports–throughout the U.S.–of people finding a “powdery substance” in an envelope. The feds couldn’t possibly investigate every case, but they would verify at least a few of the real anthrax cases.
The number of fatalities wouldn’t be very high, but they wouldn’t have to be if you’re only trying to cause terror.
A mysterious letter containing a white powdery substance was just found in Berlin, Germany. It turned out to be nothing but caused quite a big scare. This anthrax threat is turning out to be too easy to mimic.
By the way, aren’t you all glad that Sam Stone isn’t a terrorist? He’s got some crafty ideas up his sleeve…
Screw anthrax. Why go to all the trouble of doing this with a substance that at best is highly unlikely to infect and kill anyone?
If you want to distribute a lethal substance by mail, go get yourself some plutonium, grind it up, and mail it across country. Whip up some positive pressure envelopes so that the stuff actually gets pushed out upon opening and has a better chance of landing in someone’s lungs.
Rumors that the Israelis are behind it all are widely believed and reported in the Muslim world. The terrorists are not trying to convince us that the Israelis are behind it. They are trying to convince some of their more gullible fellow Muslims. That way, any counterattack we launch is unjustified, and is grounds for further outrage in the Middle East. The terrorists are trying to foment a world war between Muslims on the one side and “Infidels” on the other.
Interesting point, spoke-, I never thought of that.
Then again, its also an option that maybe some members of the staff like to get together and smear each other with animal faeces.
its a possibility!! 
This should shed some light on the op
October 12, 2001 – BIOTERRORISM alarmists view the death of a Florida man from anthrax as validation of their hype and hysteria. Cooler heads see the incident more as a limited biocrime, not a harbinger of mass bioterrorism.
Such skepticism arises from the often glossed-over difficulty of using anthrax as a weapon of mass bioterror.
Anthrax is a bacterium that may cause death by inhalation, ingestion or skin contact. The most lethal exposure is inhalation of anthrax spores, bodies carrying the bacterium.
Alarmists such as American Public Health Association chief Mohammad Akhter say, “One billionth of a gram, smaller than a speck of dust can kill.” But one spore, even thousands, will not kill anyone.
Wool sorters inhale 150 to 700 anthrax spores an hour continually without danger. Studies show that inhalating 10,000 spores is necessary for infection. As with other toxins, the dose makes the poison.
The technical hurdles and costs associated with exposing many people to enough anthrax is daunting. Before the spores can become a mass inhalation threat, they must be converted to powdered form. Liquified anthrax would fall to the ground and be ineffective.
Even assuming terrorists knew how to make mass quantities of powdered anthrax without killing workers and surrounding populations, production would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Purchasing unemployed, ex-Soviet bioweapons experts is insufficient.
Only the United States and Russia so far have succeeded in powderizing anthrax for weaponization. Iraq has anthrax only in liquid form and knows this is virtually useless.
Through 1998, U.N. inspectors found anthrax in few of the hundreds of Iraqi warheads they examined. If Iraq had an effective form of anthrax, it would likely have been found in many more warheads - like its many nerve-gas warheads.
Powderizing anthrax is only part of the challenge.
Released to the air, spores are subject to weather. Too much wind disperses them into harmless concentrations. Insufficient wind causes them to fall to the ground where they won’t rise again in harmful concentrations.
Airplanes dusting a city with spores? Not much use. The few spores entering buildings would mostly settle; the few that didn’t would likely be insufficient in concentration to cause infection. Outside, spores would mostly fall to the ground or be blown away and rendered harmless.
Theres some more in the article but thats the crux of it.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/33790.htm
Put my mind to rest somewhat
And that report seems clearly wrong on several counts. First, there is no doubt that *someone is shipping around powderized Anthrax. So unless they got it from a U.S. lab or the Russians, someone else has managed it. Regardless, bad guys DO have it, and are using it.
Second, I think the report underestimates the likelihood of being infected. For the simple reason that small quantities of powderized anthrax in two envelopes have managed to infect two people. That’s a pretty good infection rate for something that would only infect ‘dozens’ of people if dropped on an entire city.
Caiata, I saw in the news today that postal workers are being advised about precautions to take in handling letters and packages. 
Sam Stone, I sure thought about you today! I get a lot of junk mail, usually credit card offers, and I throw them away without opening them. However, I usually rip the entire envelope into several pieces to keep someone else from using the info to obtain a credit card in my name. I got one today and had started to tear the envelope down the middle when I thought about your post here and blowing into envelopes . . . ripping them into pieces would probably do a pretty good job of scattering spores into the air in the immediate vicinity of my nose. Guess from now on I’ll burn them instead
World Eater, er . . . I know these articles are reassuring and probably the average person has no idea how to go about producing anthrax, but it really isn’t that hard to do. I went to lab tech school - not only do I know how to culture various bacteria, I have a nifty textbook that gives me explicit instructions for culturing anthrax. The only difficult thing is obtaining anthrax spores - and if you live in farming/ranching country you probably have a good idea where to find some. While you do need some specific equipment to do it with, none of it is terribly expensive or hard to acquire - if nothing else it is readily available to be stolen.
If you’re a suicidal terrorist, you don’t even have to worry about protecting yourself - but even that isn’t too hard. And if you’re using plain old common anthrax instead of some fancy bioengineered version, it’s susceptible to penicillin so you take prophylactic antibiotics, just like the exposure victims are doing now.
(BTW, ordinarily I would provide specific details in the above paragraphs to back up what I am saying, but I’m really not comfortable with doing that now. No point in telling some crazy bastard how to grow anthrax in their garage!)
Anyway, the reason anthrax is a popular bio-weapon is that it’s cheap and easy. Here is a link that will back me up without giving details:
I think Max Harvey has hit upon what the actual situation is - spreading panic with little investment. As it’s been mentioned in the news, I don’t mind saying that if you really wanted to infect a lot of people with anthrax the send-it-through-the-mail technique is ridiculous - you would dump it in a building’s ventilation system so it would be blown out of the vents.
Also, I notice no one is mentioning much about the third form of anthrax - gastrointestinal. I’ve got varying figures for the fatality rate - anywhere from 90% to 25-60%! But that would probably be the easiest way to infect the largest number of people with a serious disease - contaminate a common food source or medication, like Tylenol or aspirin. Something that wouldn’t be cooked and/or washed before eating - like instant pudding mix. Or a sugar coated cereal (where any powder would go unnoticed). Powdered doughnuts? I’ll leave it up to Sam Stone’s devious mind to conjure up something