Biological Weapons

Biological warfare agents include both living microorganisms (bacteria, protozoa, rickettsia, viruses, and fungi), and toxins (chemicals) produced by microorganisms, plants, or animals.

There is a long list of BW agents that terrorists could potentially use including anthrax, cryptococcosis, escherichia coli, haemophilus influenzae, brucellosis (undulant fever), coccidioidomycosis (San Joaquin Valley or desert fever), psittacosis (parrot fever), yersina pestis (the Black Death of the 14th Century), tularemia (rabbit fever), malaria, cholera, typhoid, bubonic plague, cobra venom, shellfish toxin, botulinal toxin, saxitoxin, ricin, smallpox, shigella flexneri, s. dysenteriae (Shiga bacillus), salmonella, staphylococcus enterotoxin B, hemorrhagic fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, histoplasma capsulatum, pneumonic plague, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, dengue fever, Rift Valley fever, diphtheria, melioidosis, glanders, tuberculosis, infectious hepatitis, encephalitides, blastomycosis, nocardiosis, yellow fever, typhus, tricothecene mycotoxin, aflatoxin, and Q fever.

Anthrax , botulinum toxin , plague , ricin , smallpox , tularemia and viral hemorrhagic fevers are on the top of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's list of biological weapons, considered "Category A" weapons most likely to be used in an attack.

New, genetically-engineered agents could be designed to defeat conventional methods of treatment.

Biological weapons, unlike chemical weapons which become less lethal as they are dispersed, can multiply and mutate as they spread making them even more virulent and difficult to protect against.

Back to Today's Threats