06.15.11
Getting it wrong civil defense
A mock “ricin” emergency drill in Taos, outside of the general procedural rules adopted for these kinds of white powder incidents, gets it all wrong on the nature of the hazard. For example, ricin intoxication, is not contagious so there is no need for quarantine.
If one cannot assume anything on the nature of the powder, then the only procedure to follow is to quarantine everyone. Which is obviously not done in these types of drills or in the many actual hoax white powder incidents around the country.
Ricin has never been made into a powdered WMD.
Yes, there’s an old US military patent on such a thing. But its silent abandonment many years before the Cold War ended indicated it was faulty.
Ricin is a toxic protein present in the castor seed and you simply can’t purify enough of it to fashion into any even remotely effective WMD. DD put a stake through it back in 2004 at Globalsecurity.Org, a time when people seriously thought the procedure in the patent worked and complained that public access to it on the web was a serious threat.
Since then there have been no successful cases of ricin use as a WMD despite much wishful thinking on the subject. That’s in over a decade.
Therefore, blowing a small amount of castor seed powder out of an envelope is, practically speaking, no hazard although, since the war on terror, everyone must act like it’s so. The fear factor now associated with it, although virtually groundless, is real.
Continual exposure to castor seed powder — which never happens in the US anymore because there are no longer any castor mills — can result in allergy.
This is briefly described here at a network for physicians in the business of treating asthma and allergy.
Years ago it became pointless trying to explain any matter having to do with this to anyone in the government or national security industry.
Fact free hazard drills are now often simply the only way to do things.