Word: bacterias
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Iraqis proved how simple it was, beginning in 1989 with the production of anthrax--bacteria that cause deadly hemorrhaging in the brain and chest--at the Al Hakam Single Cell Protein Production Plant. In the mid-1980s, before the U.S. belatedly banned such dangerous exports, Iraq's Education Ministry ordered 70 packages of microbes and toxins from the American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit outfit in Rockville, Md. Included were flasks of freeze-dried anthrax spores. Iraqi labs reconstituted the spores in soy broth and put them into a small fermenter filled with a growth medium. The medium, Zilinskas says...
...similar process produced the even deadlier toxin of botulinum bacteria, but because oxygen kills these germs, they were grown in a fermenter infused with nitrogen. Botulism is a severe kind of food poisoning that causes paralysis and death. The Iraqis also used the castor-bean plant, widely grown in the country, to produce the poison ricin, which kills by altering the body's use of proteins and causing circulatory collapse and heart failure...
What mildly alarms me is how prevalent and widely accepted this practice is. Which makes me find my mother's otherwise anal policies on hygiene kind of ironic. We will regularly trade off oral bacteria seething from the remains of our daily diet but she insists that I change my clothes and remove my shoes immediately upon entering the house...
...This is the poor man's atom bomb. A gram of anthrax culture contains a trillion spores, theoretically enough for 100 million fatal doses. The stuff can be spread into the air with backpack sprayers or even perfume atomizers. The U.N.'s specialists say that 100 lbs. of anthrax bacteria sprayed around a city of 1 million could kill 36,000 people within a week. And Saddam has produced anthrax in large amounts, along with botulinum, a poison that kills by paralyzing the victim, and aflatoxin, a carcinogen...
ATTACK OF THE KILLER CHICKEN! Thorough cooking can save us from bacteria-ridden fowl. Arnold will play Colonel Sanders in the flick...