Someone said....It didn't have to be that good. (Pure)
So why was it???
I sort of answered this in another post. But here it is again:
A lot of other people were surprised by the purity because they were expecting something from some biological weapons program.
Such programs concentrate on quantity not quality/purity. They use industrialized processes where purity is a waste of time and money. Dropping a pound of powder that's only 10 percent spores on a soldier will kill him just as dead as an ounce of 100% pure spores, and the production costs for the impure powder are much MUCH less.
"PURE" spores come from a lab. The anthrax mailer didn't HAVE to create a powder of pure anthrax spores. The powder in the media letters was only 10 percent spores; the rest was just debris. Nevertheless, that impure powder harmed more people (12) than the powder made from PURE spores (10), but that's primarily because people took antibiotics to protect themselves from the second mailing. (And it depends upon how you count Kathy Nguyen. If you mistakenly believe that she was killed by the second mailing, then the pure and impure powders hurt the same number of people -- 11 each.)
Why did the anthrax mailer send PURE spores in the second mailing? Apparently he did it because the first mailing had almost no effect. It didn't achieve the intended result. It scared no one. So he created a really scary powder for the second mailing.
Ed