Word: bacterium
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...Tucker:Anthrax is a bacterium, but when it?s exposed to air, it forms a spore resembling a seed. The spore is very rugged, and very persistent. If it?s introduced into the soil in that spore form, it can live for years, even decades. That?s the form it would probably be take if it were used as a biological weapon - spores introduced into the air via some delivery method...
...considered a number of different viruses and bacteria, including those that cause hepatitis and typhus, but decided for their purposes (disrupting the outcome of a local election) on a strain of salmonella that would be debilitating but not fatal. Salmonella poisonings tend to be localized. With proper hygiene, the bacterium is not particularly contagious...
...thousands of Americans each year. In New York City this spring, a man was arrested after he was spotted spraying what turned out to be feces-laden water over the contents of a midtown salad bar (fortunately, no one got sick). A far more virulent strain of the bacterium called O157:H7 is sometimes fatal, but identifying and isolating the right strain is beyond the technical capabilities of most terrorists...
...centuries. But today’s fears are of the deliberate creation of a virulent plague. Iraq, Iran, Russia, North Korea, Libya, Syria and Sudan are all known to have biological weapons programs. The U.S. and the Russia have both worked on the development of anthrax, a bacterium that is spread among livestock and that poses significant dangers to humans. Terrorists could even reverse one of humanity’s greatest achievements by reintroducing smallpox, which has been eradicated by a sustained global health effort and which is no longer treated as a danger requiring immunization...
...these experiments, researchers would transfer loose strands of DNA-—the basic molecular unit of heredity—from warm-blooded animals into specimens of E. coli, a commonly-utilized laboratory bacterium, in hopes of producing a new species with heretofore unknown characteristics...