Question that comes to mind is how easy would it be to take the bacteria that make it to the center, and put them on a new plate with a different antibiotic in the same configuration, and then repeat until you've gone through all available antibiotics, then scoop that last batch up and do something really nasty with it?
It must be harder than it seems, because otherwise why do terrorists and the like even bother with (seemingly much harder to obtain, though admittedly flashier) chemical and nuclear weapons?
The problem is bacteria are generally not that dangerous. You might need antibiotics a few times in your life. But, people regularly lived to 70+ without them.
Thus post attack the deaths would take a long time to add up and be hard to trace back to some attack.
PS: I had a foot of my intestines removed without being prescribed antibiotics or getting an infection.
Bioweapons are hard to deploy in a targeted fashion. Also, development of an antibiotic resistant bacteria that would be truly dangerous to a population requires great care during development not to kill those doing the development themselves. Also, I think we tend to overestimate the resources available to terrorists.
Fair point! I suppose I should reword it to say something like "why aren't we more concerned with this, at least as concerned as we are about chemical and nuclear weapons," but I guess "they're actually not that acutely dangerous that other comments have pointed to is the reason.
Question that comes to mind is how easy would it be to take the bacteria that make it to the center, and put them on a new plate with a different antibiotic in the same configuration, and then repeat until you've gone through all available antibiotics, then scoop that last batch up and do something really nasty with it?
It must be harder than it seems, because otherwise why do terrorists and the like even bother with (seemingly much harder to obtain, though admittedly flashier) chemical and nuclear weapons?