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Notes -
A few of your notes are missing links - was this an error?
Ricin is more dangerous than anthrax, because anthrax responds well to treatment and ricin doesn't. There's this interview with Fauci, which I'm having trouble tracking down (I found another one where he talks about it, but it's not the one I'm thinking of), where he says that when he got an envelope that sprayed him with white powder, he immediately figured three possibilities, and his words were something like "1) it's baby powder, and I'll be fine, 2) it's anthrax, and I'm gonna get sick, but I'll take antibiotics and I'll recover, 3) it's ricin, and I'm dead".
Anthrax contamination can be expensive to clean up if there's a lot of it (infamously, the British tested it on an island, and cattle that ate grass there still died from anthrax 70 years later; the way they ended up fixing the site was to strip the topsoil off the entire island and incinerate it), but deaths are rare and epidemic's impossible (because modern Western countries don't leave dead bodies lying around and anthrax doesn't spread living to living).
I see, I'm more worried about incidents with many casualties, but it seems interesting that it's more lethal given infectoin.
To be clear, while generally regulated as a biological weapon due to its origin (it's extracted from the castor plant), ricin is a toxin rather than something that replicates; one is poisoned with ricin, not infected. Anthrax, however, is weaponised as viable spores, which do infect people and replicate inside them (but as noted, anthrax doesn't spread living to living; it's corpses of people/animals that have died of anthrax that spread it to others).
Bioweapons that actually threaten epidemic are generally known to be For Crazy People Only (because, well, once you release one of those it's pot luck whether it comes back to infect your guys too). Stuff like plague (ISIL played around with this a few years back, IIRC, but thankfully they only killed themselves with it) and smallpox (extinct, but the tech exists to bring it back) fall into this category.
Thanks!
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