Posted on 02/22/2014 10:33:53 AM PST by BenLurkin
There are four major infectious agents that officials fear terrorists will turn into potent bioweapons. The first three you know — smallpox, anthrax, and the plague. The fourth....
...tularemia is a serious disease. Humans can contract...through the bites of ticks and flies or handling the corpses of infected bunnies. Failure to cook said bunnies thoroughly will also make you sick. And that's not all....15 residents of Martha's Vineyard came down with "rabbit fever" in a single season — an outbreak thought to have started when someone ran over an infected rabbit with a lawnmower.
...Russia, and Japan have all been experimenting with tularemia's use as a bioweapon since at least World War II. That's why researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are peering into the bacterium's inner workings to learn how we might fight such an outbreak....finding tularemia to be a rather sneaky microbe.
As an epidemiologist with the CDC's Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, Kiersten Kugeler says tularemia is a cause for concern because it's both highly infectious and widely available in nature.... "And just last week the CDC announced a cooperative effort with other federal agencies, international organizations, and foreign governments to launch the Global Health Security Agenda[???], which Kugeler said is designed to "standardize and unify response to disease outbreaks and close gaps in surveillance and response."[???]
Kugeler says terrorists would require technology of "substantial sophistication" to weaponize rabbit fever on a large scale.
Then again, sometimes the simplest methods work best. There's some evidence to suggest that the Hittites used rabbit fever against their enemies over 3,300 years ago — making it the first known instance of bioterrorism. The Hittites' method? Leaving infected rams along the roads traveled by their enemies. After all, who can resist a free ram?
Well.
That didn't take very long.
Sgt Bugs Bunny is not a Rabbit.
He is a Wascally Wabbit.
Elmer Fudd told me.
Very cute....but not what I usually think of as “Swedish Bunnies.”
Yes please!
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