RICIN MYSTERY

The big news today, of course, is that the biotoxin ricin appears to have been found in the office of Bill Frist, the Senate’s major­ity leader. An enve­lope filled with the pow­der was dis­cov­ered in Frist’s mail room. And now, three Senate office build­ings have been shut down while the mail is checked there, too.
There’s some­thing odd about the dis­cov­ery, how­ever. As near as I can tell (and I may have this wrong) peo­ple don’t get hurt from inhal­ing ricin — at least, not a lit­tle bit of it. Eating the stuff is what’s so deadly. That’s why pre­vi­ous ter­ror plots using ricin have involved poi­son­ing the food or water sup­ply.
“When you talk about anthrax ver­sus this ricin — the same amount of anthrax, about one kilo­gram — you would need four met­ric tons of ricin to pro­duce the same effect. So a lit­tle bit of it really isn’t going to cre­ate much of a prob­lem,” CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta said.
“To the best of my knowl­edge, in a human being, inhal­ing it has never hurt any­body,” Frist tells the New York Times.
THERE’S MORE: “Ricin may actu­ally indi­cate a fair bit of sophis­ti­ca­tion: it sug­gests an attacker famil­iar enough with it to know it would sur­vive the irra­di­a­tion of sen­ate email unharmed, unlike other liv­ing bio­log­i­cal agents,” writes reader TH.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who heads the Federation of American Scientists’ chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons efforts, dis­agrees.
“Ricin is easy to make,” she writes. “ANYONE could have done it. I sus­pect that this is rou­tine nut stuff.“
What’s more, Rosenberg adds, “if it was not weaponized to form an aerosol, it would have to be eaten to be toxic (eg, eat­ing with con­t­a­m­i­nated hands–unlikely to deliver much of a dose). The lack of pre­cau­tions being taken at Dirksen sug­gests they know already it is not aerosoliz­able.“
AND MORE: Gary Ackerman, with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), warns that ricin can be ultra-​​deadly in an aerosol form. “About 3 mil­ligrams will kill the aver­age adult,” he notes.
Making ricin aerosoliz­able is eas­ier than doing it to, say, anthrax — a liv­ing organ­ism that can be killed at it’s crushed into a fine pow­der. But, accord­ing to a CNS report from last year, ricin “aerosoliza­tion by means of a dis­per­sal device… would require exten­sive prior research, devel­op­ment, oper­a­tional plan­ning, and test­ing, and [is] thus prob­a­bly beyond the means of most ter­ror­ists.“
“This is not a weapon of mass casu­al­ties,” Ackerman says, refer­ring to the Frist let­ter. “This is intended to get media atten­tion.“
AND MORE: The White House was also sent a ricin let­ter — way back in November, ABC News is report­ing. Another ricin pack­age was left in a South Carolina post office last October.

February 3rd, 2004 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.