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No matter how smallpox is altered, it can only spread in conventional ways once it has been introduced into the population. The way they highjacked the four planes was instructive to me. If our system hadn't been so OPEN they would never have gotten away with the initial steps. They were clumsy. Their arrogance made people mad, and that made people obstruct them and remember them. They saw a way to use half-trained pilots, some money, and some common tools to make weapons of mass-destruction. Honestly, neither the 9/11 attacks NOR the anthrax-mailings have required a great deal of finesse or cleverness, once the initial ideas were conceived. They were able to use relatively stupid, clumsy, inept agents to carry them out. I'm not going to look for a very sophisticated delivery system of smallpox. Whatever they do it's going to be done in a way analogous to the prior attacks. I can think of ways in which a simple, cheap attack will infect thousands at once, and I can think of ways that will infect only a few at transportation hubs. EITHER WAY, there are actions I can take to protect MY family. Most of those actions require a little prior planning. I thought this thread would be about the planning, not about the threat per se. That's okay, obviously the threat isn't being discussed enough.

But one thing I want to make clear: this isn't something we cannot survive--even if Zog's fears are true and this is going to be a modified smallpox with considerably worse symptoms. (I doubt that Russia was as clumsy with anything they've modified.) The first people to get it are doomed to suffer and possibly die--the rest of us can take action to diminish our family's risk. Influenza can spread so easily because we congregate, we go to work sick, we don't treat it very seriously. (Heck, we don't treat AIDS seriously enough--if we did, far, far fewer people would be infected and none of those would be free to spread it.) EVEN SMALLPOX DOESN'T HAVE TO BE AS EFFECTIVE AS 9/11 WAS. But that will hinge on our behavior! I would really, really like it if the last moment of smugness for the evil ones was 9/11. And if they let smallpox loose on the world, their allah will not be able to save them from the wrath of the rest of us.