You wake up early to go to work and kill your family, goodbye. On your daily commute you see a man drop a glass vial on the subway, but you don't think about it. Moments later you become a statistic. A bioterrorism statistic. The threat of bioterrorism, long ignored and denied, has intensified in recent years and needs to be addressed publicly. The biggest dangers today are anthrax and smallpox, but people remain unsure of what should be done as the government goes undercover to solve the problem while the media is left to give its own exaggerated version of all opinions on things . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Although terrorists can use many pathogens, biological warfare experts consider anthrax and smallpox to be the two greatest dangers. Other infectious diseases that pose a threat include plague, tularemia, botulism, and tuberculosis. However, experts believe that these organisms and diseases are unlikely to cause widespread illness because they are difficult to produce and distribute. These organisms are also less resistant than anthrax. Anthrax is caused by Bacillus anthracis and its spores. Anthrax can infect people in three different ways. Cutaneous anthrax develops when bacteria enter the body through superficial cuts or wounds on the skin. The vast majority of anthrax infections are cutaneous. Intestinal anthrax results from eating food contaminated with anthrax bacteria. Inhalation anthrax occurs when you breathe anthrax bacterial spores into your lungs. This form of anthrax is generally fatal. The mortality rate for anthrax from inhaled sources is very high and approaches 100%. Death rates are lower for anthrax that enters the body through food or a wound. Anthrax is not spread from person to person, the same way a cold or flu is spread, so it cannot spread to large populations. However, microbiologists consider anthrax a grave danger because its bacteria are suitable as a weapon. Anthrax is easy to produce and is readily available throughout the world. The spores do not require special handling procedures, so terrorists could bring anthrax to many locations for distribution. It could be used to eliminate specific people or places. Unlike many pathogenic bacteria, spores can survive intense heat and cold. Doctors have no experience treating anthrax on the scale of a biological attack, so it's difficult to predict exactly what might happen. Treatment of anthrax with antibiotics such as Cipro can be successful if anthrax is identified as the cause of the disease and exposed people receive treatment quickly. Anthrax is just one of our major concerns. Another danger is smallpox. Smallpox, an infectious disease caused by the Variola virus, was eradicated from the world in 1977. Three years later, the World Health Assembly recommended an end to routine vaccinations, and most countries complied. Smallpox spreads from person to person when infected people sneeze, spray fine droplets of the virus into the air, or through direct contact such as kissing. Infected people can transmit the disease after developing a rash, but high fever and fatigue often send them to bed early. Because the virus causes smallpox, antibiotics do not treat the infection. There are currently no other drugs known to treat smallpox. However, some initial results from laboratory studies showthat the drug cidofovir is promising in the fight against the smallpox virus. If you are exposed to the smallpox virus, vaccination within three days of exposure can prevent the onset of the disease. Vaccination within a week of exposure to the virus can help reduce the severity of the disease. Unlike anthrax, the smallpox virus is generally considered a "worse" bioterrorism threat agent because it is contagious through the air and kills about a third of its victims and is contagious from person to person. But terrorists would have had difficulty to obtain the virus because smallpox was eradicated from the human population through a global vaccination campaign in the 1960s and 1970s, and the last reported case in the world was in 1978. Samples of the smallpox virus currently exist in only a few laboratories. However, in addition to the two safe repositories of the virus located in the United States and Russia, circumstantial evidence suggests that undeclared stocks of the smallpox virus may exist in countries of concern such as Iraq and North Korea. If terrorists were to get their hands on the smallpox virus, virus, they would have to cultivate it and then find some means of spreading it. The simplest method would be for suicide terrorists to become infected with the virus and spread it among the crowd, but even terrorists willing to die instantly in a blaze of glory might think twice about suffering the torment and disfigurement of smallpox . Other delivery methods would be technically challenging. However, while the risk of a terrorist attack with smallpox is low, it is not zero, and the disastrous consequences of an uncontrolled epidemic mean that the US government must err on the side of caution. Currently, the federal government is taking two steps to reduce the nation's vulnerability to smallpox: Tests to determine whether the approximately 7.5 million doses of smallpox vaccine currently available can be safely diluted to provide up to 75 million doses , and accelerate the production of 40 million additional vaccine doses so that they will be available by the end of next year. However, even if a large amount of smallpox vaccine were available today, it would not be desirable to prophylactically vaccinate the general population due to the risk of serious complications, particularly in people who are HIV positive or who have some other form of immune. compromise. Because of the risk, most Americans alive today have never been vaccinated against smallpox or no longer have effective immunity. Until 1971, it was mandatory for US children to be vaccinated before entering school, even though the last case of smallpox in the US was in 1949. After 1971, however, the government stopped routine vaccination, having assessed that the risk of smallpox being imported into the United States from a country where it was still endemic was lower than the risk of side effects associated with the smallpox vaccine, which caused occasional deaths or serious complications in people with compromised immune systems, eczema, and even in a few healthy people. Furthermore, a single smallpox vaccination did not provide lifelong protection; instead, the level of immunity gradually declined over about ten years, unless "boosted" by a second vaccination, which provided much longer-lasting protection. Therefore, Americans who were vaccinated only once as children, or who were never vaccinated, are susceptible to infection if the disease were to reappear. Vaccination can prevent smallpox if given up to four days after exposure but before symptoms appear, but not treatment.