Risk Assessment in Bioterrorism

General concerns about terrorist use of biological agents have increased at U.S. state and federal levels and in the popular press. However, establishment of effective security and counterterrorism programs will require condensing generalizations about such threats into specific attack scenarios, as well as use of an analysis method that helps focus decision makers on those scenarios that are both most probable and potentially most damaging. This chapter proceeds on the premise that risk assessment methodologies developed for human health and the environment can be adapted to move decision makers beyond potentially intractable generalizations about who or what is threatened by bioterrorism toward specific scenarios that can be evaluated, anticipated, and managed. A two-step process is outlined with which to achieve this goal: first, a vulnerability analysis to define and rank scenarios, followed, for the more highly ranked scenarios, by a quantitative risk assessment to more clearly identify (and eventually manage) specific factors contributing to risk. Keywords: Asset; attribute; exposure assessment; hazard characterization; hazard identification; human health risk assessment; microbial risk assessment; quantitative risk assessment; risk assessment; risk characterization; risk estimation; risk management; vulnerability analysis