ABSTRACT
The book of Exodus in the Old Testament tells of ten plagues visited on Egypt and of the escape of the Israelites when the Red Sea parted. Some doubt that these events ever occurred. Researchers have offered alternative explanations. In regard to the parting of the Red Sea, strong winds, not unusual for the area, could have parted the Red Sea long enough for the exodus. Another idea is that a comet collision blackened the sky and cast ash on the land with devastating consequences that could help explain at least some of the ten plagues. A third explanation of events is a volcanic eruption on the Greek Island of
Santorini (Thira), about 1,000 km (621 miles) away. The volcanic eruption could have led to massive waves that parted the Red Sea long enough for the people to escape, and then swamped the pursuing chariots. The eruption is asserted to have cast an enormous amount of acidic ash into the air, which headed southeast toward Egypt. The ash fell, killed fish, animal and plant life. Red tide formed, which set off a chain that turned the water blood red, reduced oxygen in the sea, provided an overabundance of nutrients to frogs, gnats, lice, and flies that died. These were incorporated into the food chain, leading to anthrax among cattle. This devastating chain continued and with good imagination could be the cause of the ten plagues (Marr, Malloy 1996; Sparks 2007). Whether you believe the biblical account or the speculative scientific ones,
anthrax mentioned in one of the alternative explanations and other biological organisms are a concern in the twenty-first century. Governments facing external and internal enemies with moral, political, strategic and personal objectives are well aware of the threat. Along with an all-out nuclear war involving explosions of high-yield weapons across the globe, spread of radiation, darkening of the skies, and other possible effects such as uncontrollable fires, starvation, and other outcomes of
a nuclear war, biological agents should be high on the list of acute hazard events to worry about. Some of this concern is amplified by media. For example, writing in the Toledo
Blade, in 2000, the year prior to the anthrax attacks, Michael Woods (2000) called anthrax an “agent of doom,” labelling it as the “100-megaton bomb in the arsenal of bioterrorism and biological warfare.” He cites a study that indicates that a small amount of powdered anthrax material, seeded into the air of a city, could kill more than 1 million people. In contrast, he adds that 80,000 would die in the explosion of a 12.5 kiloton atomic bomb. Of course, not every media story compares degrees of gloom and doom, and some do acknowledge uncertainty. Yet, as pointed out in Chapter 3, the media understand the power of negative information and use it to cultivate and maintain audiences. Even without media enhancement, bioterrorism is a major concern of nation-states and non-governmental organizations because some extremely dangerous organisms are relatively easy to obtain, turn into weapons and dispersed, especially anthrax (Block 2001). This chapter uses anthrax to examine efforts to prevent bioterrorism, which
includes the use of risk assessment and risk management. Risk assessments are based primarily on animal data (see Chapter 2), which leads to high uncertainty in defining actionable levels for risk managers who are pushed to remove all exposures after an event and prevent exposures with prophylactic drugs and antibiotics, which are expensive and not risk-free.
