Tales of a Brown-Haired Freak

And so ends the much lamented medical micro, going out, as it were, with a bang.

No, really - today we discussed microbes as terrorism weapons (more specifically, how hard it is to use them effectively).

Planning on filling a box with dynamite and anthrax and setting it off in the subway? Don't bother - the shock wave will kill the spores. Going to stand on top of a japanese high rise and spray anthrax spores out over the crowds in the middle of the afternoon for 4 hours? Also not a good idea - UV from the sun will destroy the spores long before they come into contact with people. I suppose if you wanted to avoid that possibility, you could rig the exhaust pipe of a car to spray anthrax as you drove around downtown tokyo for a few days. But that too, would be doomed to failure - it's almost impossible to aerosolize the spores finely enough so that they'd make it deep enough into the lungs to cause damage. (That was also the Aum Shinrikyo, better known for the tokyo subway sarin attacks.). I suppose we're lucky that, as a whole, the world's doomsday cults aren't too bright.

That's the good news. The bad news is that, if someone ever actually managed to engineer an effective biological attack to, oh say influence local elections, we're all pretty much doomed. History tells us (as well as various simulations) that were say, smallpox to be release into an american shopping mall, society as a whole is pretty much doomed. Economic and social collapse of the world as we know it. We'd be lucky if the government even realized what was happening, let alone found the perpetrators. And there's been other simulations done since, none of which have predicted a much better outcome.

Oh, and since doctors are most likely to be the first to deal with any infected people that turn up, we're going to be the first to die. Sorry!

Happy thoughts to end a not-so-happy course.