Terrorists are mostly stupid, but some are not. A non-stupid terrorist would gather infected materials and spread them taking reasonable care not to get infected. The only sources of materials right now are Africa, so they would go to grave sites and scoop up material and double zip lock bag it. They would put it in their checked bags and use one of the 13,500 outstanding visas to ebola countries to get here. Obviously they would try not to be infected at that point.
Once they are here, you can use your imagination to figure out how to spread the virus. Chlorine kills it, so that removes that vector. But there are many others.
“You are all thinking way inside the box ... he will also be struggling to walk.”
Talk about being inside the box. Yikes, palmer. Don’t forget that a corpse is incredibly contagious. Most anyone can carry a bag across the Mexican border. You don’t even need an entire body — just part of one.
When I say something can be done by terrorists, I know what the heck I’m talking about. I think it through. But please don’t tempt me to be more specific!
You have to keep in mind the biology of the virus itself.
Going to a gravesite and trying to recover viable virus might not work. One paper said that bodies of dead animals found in the African forest were not contagious after 3 or 4 days. I have a microbiologist friend who studied the kinetics of viral inactivation in dead bodies; she does not think that any virus would remain viable after about 2 hours, due to pH changes and so forth in the decomposing body.
Then there is the question of whether terrorists would be able to transport a virus even if they managed to collect a viable sample. Typically, researchers who want to transport a viable virus for research purposes take measures to ensure the virus survives shipment. I will not discuss those measures here.
A terrorist’s ability to smuggle in virus-contaminated material through customs is questionable. Their ability to smuggle in such material and maintain virus viability is even more questionable.
As I have told Smokin’ Joe in the past, I do not care to discuss possible terrorism scenarios. But I will discuss virus biology, and say that possible terrorist use is NOT the aspect of Ebola that keeps me up at night.