With all boogieman countries that have been bombed lately do you think that maybe terrorist might have realized that the water isn't a target but the purification plant is. It's the first things we bomb are the purification plants and the sewage treatment plants.
Without that purification plant, the lake is already a toxic swill.
It's probably possible.
You're right about botulinum. If I were to use that, though, outside of intravenous injection, the most effective way to spread it to good effectiveness is make it airborn.
Even aerosol doesn't work according to what Boner posted.
An aerosol release could also lead to high numbers of casualties, although the event would be more localized. Experts have estimated that 1 g of aerosolized botulinum toxin could kill up to 1.5 million people (Shapiro 1997). Aerosolized particles of botulinum toxin are approximately 0.1 to 0.3 mcm in size (Shapiro 1997). Despite these estimates, some experts discount the potential of botulinum toxin as a bioweapon because the toxin may not be very stable in an aerosolized form (
Arnon 2001).
Although contamination of a water supply is feasible, this approach is unlikely since a large amount of toxin would be needed to initially contaminate water. In general, deliberated contamination of water with potential bioterrorism agents may not be very effective for the following reasons: dilution of the agent in a large body of water; direct inactivation from chlorine or other disinfectants; nonspecific inactivation by other mechanisms (such as hydrolysis, sunlight, or microbes); filtration; and the relatively small amount of water that is actually ingested from the source (
Khan 2001).
