In the event of a major biological attack...

What would you do, and how do you think authorities would respond?

Erm... by the time anyone figured out it was a major biological attack, it would be entirely too late.

Biological agents aren't instant. Their effectivity depends on who and what is getting it -- for instance, I'm one of a number of people who is immune to smallpox (yeah, really) and some people are immune to rather horrible things like Ebola.

I know novels make it look like you'd know within hours, but the truth is that it can take days or weeks for symptoms to show up. During that time (depending on the agent), people may or may not be shedding the virus/bacteria/etc. By the time they'd identified it, people would already have recovered or would be recovering.

And standard quarrantine procedures would handle it. The CDC and WHO are experienced with this, and we use their guidelines/tactics on major (non-bioweapon) disease outbreaks such as the flu.

The scenario described by Byrd is very accurate. The perfect weaponized biological terror agent would be highly contagious, have a slow onset of initial symptoms, and a high mortality rate. That way infected individuals could travel far and wide passing on the agent before becoming too ill to continue. Quarantine areas would have to be huge and dramatic, affecting the national economy as much or more than the population.

That's why stories like this scare me:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

My only hope in this sort of situation is to pray that I hear about it before I contract something and head of to isolation in the hills to ride it out. This sort of attack bothers me the most.

Well unless you live in a major metropolitan area you probably wouldn't have to worry much.

A virus attack would probably be the worst, since gas attacks are mostly used in combat and the gas dissipates so fast outside that they would have limited effectiveness.

I don't worry too much about it, because your chances of dying in a terrorist attack are practically infinitesimal. Far more likely to get murdered by one of your countrymen or die in a car crash.

Originally posted by synn
What would you do, and how do you think authorities would respond?

This is an interesting question. Haha. I would say that I was outta luck! I wouldn't be able to hide anywhere from that kind of stuff. And I don't think the rest of civilization would have much of a chance either. The authorities? They'd probably be in the same scenario. All they could do is to protect the most important people in society. I think it would be horrible. But I don't think it's going to happen. I think we are protected. Just like animals could see things that we can't...they could probably see the angels protecting us while we think up frightening idea's such as this. Hehehe