Word: infectivity
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...chill of the cold war, the Soviet Union is said to have loaded enough germs and viruses, including smallpox, aboard intercontinental ballistic missiles targeted on the U.S. to infect an entire city, a tactic Saddam Hussein is thought to have tried to copy on a more modest scale with rocket-borne smallpox "bombs" that could hit targets up to 70 miles away. He never used them. Not that restraint has always been practiced. During World War II, Japanese planes dropped plague-infested fleas on Chinese and Soviet targets, while Britain plotted to kill German cattle with anthrax...
...expert Judith Miller. Initial testing showed no sign of anthrax, but the threat still seemed real, and cunning. You didn't need to shoot the messengers; you just needed to scare them to death, because fear is bacterial as well. It can spread in the air and over wires, infect the marketplace, lay waste to whole industries and leave its victims at home in bed with the covers pulled up. And the worst part was that since there were so many scares, so many hoaxes, we were in some ways doing this to ourselves...
...Japan by Bill Patrick, former chief of the Army's bioweapons-development program. Patrick described how terrorists--armed with blenders, cheesecloth, garden sprayers and starter bugs mail-ordered from a U.S. germ bank--could spray enough deadly bacteria in the air intakes of the World Trade Center to infect 25,000 people. If that didn't scare anybody then, it will...
Presley Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics R. John Collier, who has done research on the proteins that allow anthrax to infect cells, says that he has received about 25 calls from news organizations in the last few weeks...
When I heard that a major worm, code red, was about to strike computers worldwide, I immediately got on my Mac and tried to catch it. I figured if I could infect my computer so badly that it broke, I wouldn't have to do the little bit of work expected of me. If the affliction went well, I might bring down all of AOL Time Warner. I have a real problem with the company since it took away our Snapple. That, and I had to sit through part of that last Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie...