Anthrax
As Disinformation
A Biologist's Perspective
Propaganda on biological weapons including anthrax originates in the dark cellars of government
for the purpose of swaying the public for increased police powers. A terrorist threat is hyped or
contrived, while military research on contagious diseases is concealed.

Disinformation in Media.
An example of the disinformation is an article in a news weekly which listed each of the
supposed terrorist weapons and the cost of producing them. For $10-20,000, terrorists could
supposedly kill hundreds of thousands of persons with botulism toxin, anthrax, nerve gas, etc.
"60 Minutes" had an expert who said biological weapons could be produced in someone's back
yard in a five gallon bucket. They said anthrax spores released from a boat on the Hudson River
could kill four hundred thousand persons in New York City.
Anthrax is Trivial.
Here's the truth of the matter. Anthrax will never be used successfully as a terrorist weapon, and
probably never as a military weapon. It has to be converted to spores suspended in the air, which
is technically very difficult; and the lethality is nowheres near the terror that it is made out to be.
It is not 100% lethal as often claimed. Wool sorters inhale anthrax spores in small quantities
continually , and only if they get a large dose does an infection get started.
Only US and Russia can Weaponize it.
To use anthrax as a weapon, it must be converted to a powder which can be inhaled. Only the
US and Russian militaries have succeeded in doing that. Even Iraq uses anthrax in liquid form,
which is totally ineffective.
Humans are Seldom Affected.
Anthrax is a livestock pathogen. There are anthrax spores in the ground in rural areas, because
they survive for about twenty years. They normally have no effect upon humans, because a few
anthrax spores cannot create an infection, and they do not come up from the ground in large
quantities.
Cellular Limitations.
Anthrax is what's called a "gram positive" bacterium. This means it has the type of cell walls
which are harmless, unlike the cell walls of "gram negative" bacteria, which attack tissue.
Therefore, anthrax can only attack tissue by producing a special toxin which it excretes. One cell
or spore does not produce enough toxin to start an infection.
Studies have apparently determined that, typically, ten thousand anthrax spores must be inhaled
to start an infection. That number might be someone's guess, but it is in line with the biology of
the disease. It is the number which the military uses, and only the military has significantly
researched such questions. It uses gas chambers for animal tests.
Anthrax normally attacks the lungs, because it must lodge in vulnerable tissue. It can invade
through other routes such as cuts or undercooked meat, but it only does so under third world
conditions, and those routes are not relevant to biowarfare.
Livestock eat from the ground, so they have their faces in the ground where the spores are, and
they can inhale ten thousand spores. How does anyone get ten thousand spores into the lungs of
humans?
Technical Obstacles to Weaponizing.
The first requirement would be to aerosolize the spores. The spores would have to be converted
to a dry powder, because a liquid would create globs which would fall to the ground rather than
staying suspended in the air.
To create a powder, the spores would first have to be washed several times in an array of very
large and expensive centrifuges. Then a drying apparatus would have to be used; and it would
require spraying a mist into a vacuum, which is how powders are created from liquids.
Otherwise, everything globs up into hard rocks.
How do workers clean the equipment without getting spores everywhere? A likely procedure
would be to enclose the equipment in a pressure chamber and steam sterilize it for several days.
Such an operation costs hundreds of millions of dollars, considering related facilities and
development. Only countries do that, not radical groups, and not in five gallon buckets.
It won't stay in the Air.
Even in powder form, the spores would fall to the ground rapidly in the absence of wind. Anthrax
is not adapted for airborne dissemination. It needs to stay on the ground until inhaled by
livestock. So it would not stay in the air like mold spores but would fall out easily, about like flour.
In the presence of wind, the spores would be carried away rapidly and would not stay in one
place long enough for anyone to get more than a few inhaled.
Once the spores were on the ground, they would not affect humans significantly, because they
would not come up from the ground in large enough quantities.
Foggers are Propaganda.
There is some talk about using liquids with fogging devices for dispersion of biological agents
such as anthrax. It's not realistic. First, there is no mention of the purity that would be required to
prevent globbing and plugging of nozzles. At least, a lot of expensive centrifuging would be
required to remove debris.
Then agricultural spraying demonstrates that a mist drops rapidly to the ground. It does that
because air can only hold a small amount of water, which causes sprays to precipitate.
Another problem is that spores would rapidly settle to the bottom of a liquid and form a gum due
to sticky cell debris and their tendency to clump.
A chemical mist is different, because chemicals vaporize, while cells do not. Cells in a mist
would clump together as the liquid vaporizes. To create free spores would require very clean
material, high dilution, ultra fine mist and a vacuum for rapid evaporation. Foggers can't do the
same thing.
For these reasons, anthrax would be difficult to use; and it could hardly kill more than a few
hundred persons under the most ideal conditions, not the hundreds of thousands which are
claimed. On top of that, antibiotics are effective for it during the early stage of the illness. It is not
contagious for humans.
Glib Journalism is Unrealistic.
Innumerable journalists have been insisting that anthrax can be produced in a simple laboratory
with little expertise. To the contrary, no countries but the U.S. and Russia can convert anthrax to
a usable weapon. Iraq cannot.
Consider what the journalists fail to recognize. Growing a large quantity of anthrax would result in
a fermenter full of slop which is extremely slimy and viscous with large amounts of debris and
metabolic products mixed with the nutrient medium. That slop has to be washed and converted
to a medium which will induce spores to form. Much research and knowledge would be required
to get a reasonable yield of spores. Then the cells would have to be fragmented with something
like a blender to get the spores out of the cells. Then much differential centrifugation would be
required to separate the spores from the debris. Then spray drying of spores in a vacuum would
be required.
Accomplishing all of that would require several Ph.Ds. and much developmental type research in
addition to expensive equipment and a very large building. It isn't a matter of growing something
in a kettle and pouring it into a rocket, as journalists and weapons inspectors seem to be
assuming.
Grinding is Another Absurdity.
The latest contrivance is that terrorists might weaponize anthrax by drying a slurry and grinding it
to particles 1-5 microns in size. (The bacteria are 1 by 3 microns.)
The first problem is that the gunk would dry like glue; and after grinding, it would still be glue.
Even if it were washed first, the bacteria would be sticky and would dry like glue.
The second problem is that bacteria do not tolerate grinding. They are as fragile as egg shells.
Grinding is how they are broken apart for biochemical tests. Even if only 1% were broken, the
result would be a sticky gum, not a powder; and more like 99% would be broken before getting 5
micron particles.
Journalists keep mentioning how many anthrax spores can be gotten onto the head of a pin. It's
not a question of how many can be gotten onto the head of a pin but how many can be gotten
into someone's lungs.
Planes cannot Dust a City.
A scenario which is often mentioned is that someone might use a plane to dust a large city with
anthrax during the night. It's unrealistic. First, no one in buildings would be harmed by anthrax.
The few spores that entered buildings would settle on surfaces, and few would enter the air, and
even fewer would be inhaled. At most, someone might inhale a few dozen spores per hour.
That's not the ten thousand that are needed.
Secondly, anthrax spores would not diffuse uniformly through the air like a gas. They will either
drop too fast or blow away. A few dozen persons might be killed, but that's not the terror that is
being hyped in the media. And more than anything, nobody is producing the spores in powder
form but the U.S. and Russia.
Journalists seem to assume that an anthrax cell anywhere will kill someone someplace. Putting
words alongside each other on a page is not the same thing as getting cells into humans on the
ground. There are millions of square miles of space on the ground which do not show up with the
words.
Iraq did not Weaponize Anthrax.
Saddam Hussein is said to have produced anthrax. If so, the reason is because it is stable and
easy to handle, not because it is effective when used. Iraq is unsophisticated to a point of
ineptness in its approach to biological weapons.
It is said that Iraq uses anthrax in liquid form and puts it in missiles in liquid form. In liquid form,
anthrax is almost as safe as cotton candy. Therefore, Iraq poses no anthrax threat.
In fact, military and UN inspectors only found two Iraqi warheads with anthrax in them (in liquid
form). If Iraq had anthrax in an effective form, it would have had it in hundreds of warheads, as
they did with nerve gas. So Iraq knew its anthrax was useless.
For about a billion dollars, Iraq could probably get enough experts together to develop anthrax as
a weapon. But the reason why it doesn't is that researchers already know that anthrax would be
next to worthless after it was developed.
The Whole Concept is Flawed.
Biological warfare is a flawed concept. The only route usually considered is airborne, because
bombs and missiles create the delivery system. There is no disease in existence which is
propagated in that manner. Even the airborne diseases require close contact with the source.
The reason is because wind disperses the agents too thinly, and gravity brings them down too
rapidly. Increasing the quantities massively will get a few persons, but only a few.
And then, very few of the diseases which are mentioned as biowarfare agents are suitable for
airborne dissemination. Brucellosis is not. It is disseminated through body fluids. Plague is not. It
is carried by insects from the blood of one animal to another. The insects do not pick it up from
the ground.
Motives Taylor the Truth at every Level.
Biowarfare is promoted through a combination of ignorance and propaganda. The researchers,
who should know better and often do, are getting paid to produce the agents, so they do not want
to admit the futility of it. The nonresearchers cannot realistically evaluate the claims, and they
have propaganda motives. They want to militarize society, and scare tactics go a long ways in
that direction.
The point here is not that large countries cannot make a lot of persons miserable with biological
weapons. It's that the small countries and terrorists cannot do so on their own; and it cannot be
done on a large scale and in some magical way as described in the media.

Recent Events.
Numerous persons have asked me how I interpret recent events. I think recent events
substantiate my statements to the nth degree. Only half a dozen persons have been stricken by
anthrax instead of the millions which authorities were predicting upon a terrorist attack. It shows
that anthrax is almost impossible to use effectively.
The terrorists may have succeeded in creating a lot of fear, but for casualties, guns would have
been more effective
The field tests of white powders are not credible. Anthrax powder is gray or brown, not white.
Some persons are claiming that maybe the terrorists have limited motives at this time, such as
scaring people or testing their wares. Not hardly. They threw everything they could at the World
Trade Center and went for body count. Why didn't they just fly by and scare people first?

CIA is Cause of Anthrax Incidents.
There is no source for powdered anthrax besides the US and Russian militaries. The strain was
said to be domestic, meaning not Russian. And the incidents follow the CIA style.

How to Create Anthrax Vaccine.
Vaccines are created with nineteenth century procedures, and they are hazardous to health for
that reason.

Stepped up CIA Attack.
The CIA has been harassing me for three years because of my bioweapons website. They
recently stepped up the attack. It includes spam (They have their own type of spam.) and trying
to destroy my computer with viruses, which they haven't succeeded in doing.
A year ago they tried to kill me by putting a chemical in my food which creates heart attacks.
They entered my house while I was gone, and they would siphon off organic food which I ordered
by mail. They would send it to their home base to put chemicals in it. It would come back two
weeks later, half mutilated and containing the chemical.
I removed my email address from my website (besides changing email addresses every few
days) because of the CIA attack, and I'm wondering if they are going to make another attempt to
kill me.
Gary Novak
Independent Mushroom Physiologist