Season Two of the outstanding television series– “The Colony” — debuted on The Discovery Channel this week, and while this year’s “survivors” are dumber and weaker than those on Season One, the stakes are evermore higher in the Age of Urban Bioterrorism.
Continue reading → The Colony, Season Two: Killing to Survive the Pandemic
How do you fight an invisible danger?
In our ongoing series of conversations about Urban Bioterrorism, — we have been struck by several recent realities that confirm our policy of policing the Homeland is wide open to creative and pernicious exploitation of our febrile border defenses.
Our current policy for fighting terrorism on American soil isn’t working. We seek to only deter and then punish the body.
We log citizens and their behaviors while completely ignoring the reality that the most dangerous threats to health, freedom and liberty are microscopic and undetectable — and those dangers live inside people instead of being carried by people as recognizable weapons of mass destruction.
Continue reading → Urban Bioterrorism Attack: Pernicious Tuberculosis
Yesterday in New York and New Jersey we experienced the strange and pungent odor of natural gas. No one could explain then and no one, even today, can begin to explain now. What’s going on in the urban core?
The olfactory mystery in the New York region was matched by strange activity elsewhere. In Austin, Tex., police cordoned off 10 blocks of the downtown business district early yesterday after more than 60 birds were found dead overnight along Congress Avenue, which leads to the State Capitol.Air testing there failed to find a cause, but preliminary results determined that people were not at risk. In New York, the piercing odor was the talk of Manhattan, and it called to mind another mystery: the maple syrup odor that people reported smelling on separate days in late 2005 and whose source has never been established. In yesterday’s case, several people said they were overcome by the odor.
This scenario is made up of two parts.
Please write your answer for Part A before you answer Part B and when you comment, please break up your answer into Part A and Part B.
PART A:
You are the head of a public health clinic in the urban core. An hour ago a toxic biological agent was seeded across the city by a low-flying crop-duster airplane.
The bio-agent is fast-acting and severely incapacitates in 90 minutes and kills in three hours. Everyone in the city is infected. Most are already dying in the streets as they choke to breathe in their mission to find help.
Continue reading → Urban Bioterrorism Attack: You Pick the Living
Yesterday, for about an hour, many in New York thought there had been another terrorist attack when news of a Brooklyn man infected with inhalation anthrax spread like gossipy spores in the street. When it was later discovered the man was likely self-infected by his working with untanned goat skins to make handmade drums, the City actually paused for a public moment to catch its breath before we all returned to our inner lives.
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