Imaging contaminating food/drinking water with the Prion which causes Kuru [1] for example.
I'm also not sure how you would begin to clean up afterwards - do you remove the surface of everything in your city?
To those saying bio-terrorism is ineffective or would not kill a lot of people in any appreciable time-scale, think about the terrorism aspect - imagine not being able to interact with any surface? It would be like a permanent covid lockdown on the area
The psychological effect of a large-scale area-denial would be massive
We also don't really know what the population penetrance of prion is. It's possible, for something like british mad cow disease, basically everyone got exposed, but only some people got sick due to a random high infectious load, or a weakened capability of the body to clear the prion...
There are proteases in the body that are capable of clearing amyloid forms (insulin-degrading enzyme, e.g.) and it would be hard to believe that for a sufficiently small dose it wouldn't get cleared before it got to the brain.
strange, I just looked it up, but no one has investigated if increasing IDE expression in mice has a protective effect against prpSc infection (when the infection is not administered directly to the brain)... If there are any prion researchers here... Might be an interesting experiment.
Having some unknown person(s) spreading Prion diseases around that cannot be detected until way after it happens would be close to the perfect terrorist attack imo. You could probably keep the attack going for at least a year before authorities get their act together, all the while people would be scared shitless as it would be very hard to know how the original group got infected a year earlier if you choose the right product to contaminate. (Not even mentioning the difficulty finding who did the contamination even if the specific product is found)
All such research has dual military-civilian usages. Similar to how all nuclear energy research has nuclear weapons implications. All space/rocket research has icbm implications.
As a matter of fact, all nuclear energy, space activity, etc by all nations are tied explicitly or implicitly to the military/defense.
It's why when our "enemies" ramp up on nuclear energy or space research, we ( the government and our media ) complain. It's also why we keep tabs on such research by our "allies" as well.
If any major nation is researching something, my guess is that they are also researching how to weaponize it and defend from it.
To this day, many countries ban all people who lived in the UK between 1980-1996 from donating blood (https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/bse-nachwirkungen-blut-spend...) simply because of that fear.
That's literally the desired effect. What you're thiking of is war.
> It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions
Its not the right way to infect millions of people. It does not scale. Therefore not effective.
From this point of view, mailing of anthrax in 2001 was very inefficient.
Numerous USA calamities make a lot more sense when we study them with an eye toward who benefits rather than who is blamed.
The anthrax mailing caused changes and fear in US society with very little work. That sounds like a very efficient terrorist attack IMO.
"The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims" is a definition of terrorism. Death count is irrelevant (outside of spreading fear itself). Zero deaths in a terrorist attack could still be a very effective attack. Spreading something that causes a hideous disease in a city and causing mass hysteria could be an excellent terrorist tactic. Likely better than a bomb that kills a few people.
For prions specifically, the main "problem" (which is a good thing overall for us) is that they're naked proteins, and they denature relatively quickly when outside of a protective environment. Spray them onto crops? Crops and soil are covered in small bugs and microbes which break down anything too long, including proteins and carbohydrate chains. No, in order to have prions in the food supply, you need something like cannabalistic cow-raising practices or other ways of recycling prions in a wet+hot safe environment.
How does this jive with the seemingly extreme difficulty of effective sterilization of prion-contaminated objects?
That is not how terror is defined though. The amount affected by terrorism is the amount of people that get terrorised by the act, not the amount that gets sick, dies or know someone who did. Using your definition 9/11 only affected aprox. 10.000 people but in reality if cased mass hysteria and fear in the US (and elsewhere) that is still there today.