Plants have such a high mutation and reproduction rate that every single-point mutation is tested across their vast genomes. A neutral gene that conveys no benefit or detriment will disappear in a few years; a burdensome gene that adds stress (i.e. most genes) but conveys no benefit will be selected against more quickly. It may spread initially, but it won't keep spreading forever. You see the same thing happen in antibiotic-resistant bacteria when there are no longer antibiotics available to resist, albeit much more quickly.
Fine by me—I'll picket right alongside you, as long as we make sure we have the right thing on the sign. Crop monoculture is a very under-appreciated threat to human survival.
That's a good point, but do keep in mind that many crops are genetically compatible with common grasses. A few iterations of cross-pollination would have to occur before the energy requirement to attack the crop would be worthwhile, at which point everyone might very well be reaping (oh no, puns) the same benefit anyway.
No, I definitely mean no effect on human health. To use a computing metaphor, this would be like arguing solid-state capacitors increase the chance of getting a virus. The argument makes no sense.
Plants are radically different from us. They diverged in evolution fifteen hundred million years ago, and developed multicellularity on their own. As a result they use a completely independent set of growth factors and molecules for intercellular communication. When plants harm people, it is because either (a) the plant has gone out of its way specifically to evolve a defence mechanism, like the cyanide commonly found in many seeds, or (b) the chemical is extremely abundant and causes a bad reaction, such as in gluten sensitivity (which—don't let health food advertising fool you—is a rare and extremely inconvenient mutation that cripples one's ability to extract key nutrients from a source that has been a staple in the human diet for thousands of years.)
But engineering in plants doesn't involve either category of proteins in a dangerous way. Engineering of high-abundance genes is limited to recombining existing plant parts, which has no chance of being harmful, even though it might taste bad. Most work goes into improvements in yields and herbicide resistance (sometimes through directed evolution and not actual direct genetic manipulation.) Most yield changes can be affected by increasing the activity level of a gene—not actually modifying a protein—and the proteins involved in determining yield are at extremely low abundance in the plant relative to other components. Herbicide resistance doesn't involve creating some dangerous antidote, either; it's just a matter of slightly tweaking the way the plant does its business, so that it's no longer vulnerable to whatever the herbicide exploits.
You're in much more danger from the stuff the plant's been sprayed with, which, by contrast, is only subject to approval by humans.
You may find it comforting to know that, so far, GM crops have had no direct effect on human health. (Unlike, say, drugged livestock.) Plants don't use often use hormones that are compatible with the human body, so the likelihood of health problems occurring is somewhat diminished. One notable exception is the fig, which produces a chemical similar to estrogen.
Also, a lot of people don't understand that genes only spread when they're evolutionary beneficial to the organism receiving them. Usually, the benefit is either metabolic (the ability to digest a new nutrient) or defensive (the ability to survive pesticides or natural poisons.) The worst thing that can happen to crops is that they become easier to farm. To date, the biggest legal case involving the spread of genes was a case where a farmer was re-selling herbicide-resistant seeds patented by Monsanto; pollen from a neighbouring field had spread over to his. But it's not like this affects you, the grocery-buyer—if Monsanto had contract terms saying they can sue their customers' customers, no one would do business with them!
Most of the paranoia regarding the genetic manipulation of crops is the product of a culture accustomed to paranoid science fiction. There are plenty of cases where business practices are doing serious harm to human health—factory farming, for example, is responsible for several serious diseases, some of them incurable—but GM crops really aren't an issue. We simply don't know enough to create a real mess yet.
But how do you have competition when you need a standard test? Either the companies have to agree to a flat specification for said test, in which case you need a regulatory body anyway, or they're selling the same product, in which case they can't improve their products. Making it government-run looks like the right thing to do in this case, even though it has its own inefficiencies, because there just can't be a functional market.
I'm actually particularly good at picking up new programming languages (a little less so natural languages), so I think I have some idea about what you're facing. Learning new syntaxes and vocabularies can be quite a mental investment, especially when you're not accustomed to the process—and these aren't necessarily one in the same. I'm great at picking up new grammars and rulesets, but I could never keep up when it comes to vocabulary like physiologists or biochemists can. (And in particular, I think Kanji only persists in Japanese as a form of intentional obfuscation. It's not nearly as necessary as in Chinese. Korean has the same thing, called Hanja, and the only smart thing the North Koreans ever did was eliminate it entirely.)
That being said, though, sometimes the amount of effort required to actually pick up a language is a little deceptive. When plunged into immersion settings, it's a lot easier to justify the work. (Also, don't worry about the age thing; that's been proven to be a myth.)
Sadly, it sounds like your ideal language is COBOL. There was a great deal of interest in the nineties into computer-assisted software engineering (CASE), where you drew a diagram of the code and a machine interpreted it, but there were so many possible interpretations that the complexity grew out of control, and at last count the Unified Modelling Language had well over a hundred different diagram types. Nothing beats a formal syntax for expressive power. (Also, Slashdot doesn't have a spellchecker; you probably just got a browser update foisted on you.)
Sounds like you would've been a good fit with the TUNES project which, in addition to an infinite amount of armchair pondering, would have provided something along those lines as a result of its metaprogramming goals.
In my opinion the worst OOP offences are what sane people call "setters" and "getters", but are what are probably called "mutators" and "accessors". To most people they're a necessary evil when you want to limit the range of values a variable can take on (although C# does this transparently with properties, which Microsoft (confusingly) recommends starting with an upper-case letter... what the hell, Microsoft?) but in Java, students are often taught to write them even when they're completely transparent and deal with primitive types that can't even be null!
As for developing new languages, mathematicians have actually contributed a great deal to CS in that department. Matlab and R represent the best-known math-centric languages, and tellingly, Matlab is very anti-theory—it can't pass variables by reference, no matter how big your matrices are. With a bit of digging, you might find that the language you really want is already out there, and already heavily-optimized. (Which is by far the biggest challenge in implementing a useful math-intensive programming environment.)
Just like in math, CS is riddled with context-specific names for refinements of the same thing. You wouldn't want to conflate a ring with a field, right? For what it's worth, though, the first OOP language, Simula, just called them "procedures" at the syntax level. And in the case of encapsulation, there really isn't a good, compact term for "writing all of your code properly so that nothing inappropriate is publicly accessible," so that was kind of a new concept that needed a new name.
But for what it's worth, I'm not a fan of OOP terminology either, and cringe whenever a Java-educated programmer uses the word "method" to describe any old subroutine. I assume there were structured programming advocates back in the early eighties who got annoyed when C programmers started calling everything "functions," even when they didn't have return values.
Irony of ironies, C# is almost exactly like Java at the language level, only with a totally different object hierarchy, which is why it's easier for UI development. The.NET hierarchy is somewhat influenced by classic VB, which was a very well-developed and efficient (if sometimes limiting) format for expressing common UI needs.
Java's popularity, sadly, has to do exactly with that OOP evangelism. In the late eighties and early nineties, academic software engineers were absolutely convinced OOP was the silver-bullet software development paradigm for all ills, since encapsulation (hiding methods) made code re-use practical. They also believed it was the end to all programming practices that inhibited re-use, particularly global variables. Unfortunately they made the mistake of conflating these practices with "laziness," and very mistakenly believed in a bizarrely Victorian fashion that all beginners should be forced to use only best practices, as though we should be teaching infants proper manners straight out of the crib.
It's stupid enough that I sometimes wonder if it was a massive conspiracy by Sun's marketing department, but to be honest computing has always been full of fads like this. In the early eighties, logic programming was The Way Of The Future; everyone thought that Prolog and constraint-satisfaction-based expert systems (basically, fancy predicate logic expression solvers) would dominate computing for the rest of time. Today, there are only a few niches where new Prolog code is considered desirable.
While the mods may not agree with you very strongly, I've seen a wealth of evidence that says Java is a bad introductory language. The CS department at my alma mater switched from an all-Java curriculum to one with a Python intro, and the student attrition rate dropped by a significant margin. A friend of mine—the daughter of two CS profs—was dead-set on avoiding programming as a teenager until I introduced her to languages other than Java.
While the formalisms and syntax are great for software engineers writing reusable and interoperable code, they're a serious blight to beginning programmers. The practice of teaching nothing but Java is probably more responsible for the post-dotcom drop in enrolment than the actual tech sector recession. Children should be taught something with a simple, easy-to-understand operating model like BASIC, Turing, or Pascal. It's frustrating to think about how much work went into programmer education in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and how it's all been thrown away just because the languages at hand were obsolete.
The subway platform was a separate example. The fact remains that biological attacks remain less effective against prepared targets than chemical ones, and are easier to prepare against. Further, I already agreed with you that a sleeper attack on civilians is (in principle) a valid move when were discussing prions; just not compatible with major real-world doctrines.
Because of the hygroscopic nature of triflic acid, handling
and transfer under a dry, inert atmosphere is
recommended. Contact with natural and most synthetic polymers (rubber, cork, common plastics) can lead to
reaction. For this reason, storage in glass or PTFE
containers is recommended.
Triflic acid vapour aggressively spreads through the air. People I've known who've worked with triflic acid describe the phenomenon as shimmering smoke, a little like a halon extinguisher. A cup of the stuff could most likely kill everyone on a crowded subway platform (i.e., hundreds of people) within a minute, by burning their lungs and pulmonary edema. The more humid the environment, the more aggressively it spreads. Handling the stuff unprotected for only a couple of seconds will cause nosebleeds. People would be dead long before they realised what was happening, eliminating the chance that they could warn others (a major problem with slow-acting biological weapons.)
Plenty of common industrial chemicals are seriously horrible, nasty stuff. While they do make PTFE-coated (teflon) hazmat suits specifically for handling spills of reagents like triflic acid, such suits are not appropriate for all toxins. One of the first things you learn in organic chemistry is that no material can protect against all chemicals.
I think that's a lot more dangerous than a theoretical maximum which is trivially capped by a shower and a standard ventilator and would take years to reach.
It's quite simple; extremely high concentrations of triflic acid can eat through anything but glass and teflon, including plastics and rubber. It spontaneously vaporizes if put in air that's even slightly humid, and the fumes can cause severe burns and blindness within seconds from several metres away. It can destroy buildings. And unlike a biological attack, everyone has to be outfitted with safety equipment; it can't be defeated by herding everyone into a room with extremely rapid ventilation.
Chemical attacks aren't nearly as versatile as traditional warfare, no, but they have much more potential to cause actual damage than biological attacks.
My idea of an effective chemical attack involves extremely vicious acid, not a toxin. Even so, chemical attacks are much faster-acting and can conceivably be employed without giving the enemy time to warn others.
I'm not sure what the point of your bombing explanation was, since that qualifies as shock and awe (against the air transit system itself) and could not be implemented with biological weapons.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be a worthwhile tactic, but it goes against the philosophy of the nuclear and chemical strikes. The bombing of Japan and the attacks on the World Trade Center both attempted to say the same thing: you are defenceless. They were shows of force, intended to make the military itself feel vulnerable. The military can thwart the second wave of biological attacks against it easily, so there's no chance of lasting intimidation. Attacking already vulnerable civilians essentially contravenes the doctrine of "shock and awe," which has been a component of successful military strategy all the way back to Sun Tzu and the Roman Empire, and is likely to create martyrs, as 9/11 did.
Well, it's the closest example of a modern disease. There were only a dozen or so cases of H5N1 transmitting between humans; there aren't any other good examples of epidemics affecting Western countries in the last few years, except maybe the 1972 Yugoslavian smallpox outbreak, in which there were only 175 cases and 35 deaths due to vaccination and quarantine.
"Modern practices" is, honestly, pretty simple: basic hygiene. Schools, bars, and public transit are all regularly sterilized. Simply washing your hands with warm water eliminates ninety percent of the bacteria on them. To contrast, there are millions of people in India who rely on the Ganges river for both drinking water and waste outflow—and it's not exactly segregated as to what goes into the river where. This is a major factor in the continued persistence of plague, cholera, and other diseases in those regions which Europeans would normally assume to be relics of history.
The spread of disease in hospitals is a completely different problem. Because keeping those places sterile is so important, we've come to rely on antibiotics that are normally very effective, but target specific mechanisms inside of the bacterial cell in order to kill it. Against these weapons, bacteria have had a chance to evolve defences, due to frequent usage but insufficient thoroughness.
Outside of The Dark Knight, creating panic is not actually an objective of terrorism. It's much more important for them to prove that they can do anything at any time, which is a useful bargaining chip. Fear is useless unless it affects those being extorted.
As for prions, it looks like vCJD may actually be practical as a weapon. Until the late nineties BSE epidemic in Britian, most known prion diseases cases were in people over the age of 55.
The only numbers we have on any prion's success rate were of the first Kuru epidemic in the late 50s. 1 in 50 people were affected; with about 90% being women, and all women being potentially exposed to the disease, it is likely that the rate of problems was around 4%. If vCJD has the same characteristics, this seems like a very low-yield strategy compared to alternatives like chemical poisoning. There are plenty of methods that would be about as untraceable, and could give much more effective, rapid results.
Slashdot Mirror
Plants have such a high mutation and reproduction rate that every single-point mutation is tested across their vast genomes. A neutral gene that conveys no benefit or detriment will disappear in a few years; a burdensome gene that adds stress (i.e. most genes) but conveys no benefit will be selected against more quickly. It may spread initially, but it won't keep spreading forever. You see the same thing happen in antibiotic-resistant bacteria when there are no longer antibiotics available to resist, albeit much more quickly.
Fine by me—I'll picket right alongside you, as long as we make sure we have the right thing on the sign. Crop monoculture is a very under-appreciated threat to human survival.
That's a good point, but do keep in mind that many crops are genetically compatible with common grasses. A few iterations of cross-pollination would have to occur before the energy requirement to attack the crop would be worthwhile, at which point everyone might very well be reaping (oh no, puns) the same benefit anyway.
No, I definitely mean no effect on human health. To use a computing metaphor, this would be like arguing solid-state capacitors increase the chance of getting a virus. The argument makes no sense.
Plants are radically different from us. They diverged in evolution fifteen hundred million years ago, and developed multicellularity on their own. As a result they use a completely independent set of growth factors and molecules for intercellular communication. When plants harm people, it is because either (a) the plant has gone out of its way specifically to evolve a defence mechanism, like the cyanide commonly found in many seeds, or (b) the chemical is extremely abundant and causes a bad reaction, such as in gluten sensitivity (which—don't let health food advertising fool you—is a rare and extremely inconvenient mutation that cripples one's ability to extract key nutrients from a source that has been a staple in the human diet for thousands of years.)
But engineering in plants doesn't involve either category of proteins in a dangerous way. Engineering of high-abundance genes is limited to recombining existing plant parts, which has no chance of being harmful, even though it might taste bad. Most work goes into improvements in yields and herbicide resistance (sometimes through directed evolution and not actual direct genetic manipulation.) Most yield changes can be affected by increasing the activity level of a gene—not actually modifying a protein—and the proteins involved in determining yield are at extremely low abundance in the plant relative to other components. Herbicide resistance doesn't involve creating some dangerous antidote, either; it's just a matter of slightly tweaking the way the plant does its business, so that it's no longer vulnerable to whatever the herbicide exploits.
You're in much more danger from the stuff the plant's been sprayed with, which, by contrast, is only subject to approval by humans.
Not as long as most people think.
You may find it comforting to know that, so far, GM crops have had no direct effect on human health. (Unlike, say, drugged livestock.) Plants don't use often use hormones that are compatible with the human body, so the likelihood of health problems occurring is somewhat diminished. One notable exception is the fig, which produces a chemical similar to estrogen.
Also, a lot of people don't understand that genes only spread when they're evolutionary beneficial to the organism receiving them. Usually, the benefit is either metabolic (the ability to digest a new nutrient) or defensive (the ability to survive pesticides or natural poisons.) The worst thing that can happen to crops is that they become easier to farm. To date, the biggest legal case involving the spread of genes was a case where a farmer was re-selling herbicide-resistant seeds patented by Monsanto; pollen from a neighbouring field had spread over to his. But it's not like this affects you, the grocery-buyer—if Monsanto had contract terms saying they can sue their customers' customers, no one would do business with them!
Most of the paranoia regarding the genetic manipulation of crops is the product of a culture accustomed to paranoid science fiction. There are plenty of cases where business practices are doing serious harm to human health—factory farming, for example, is responsible for several serious diseases, some of them incurable—but GM crops really aren't an issue. We simply don't know enough to create a real mess yet.
But how do you have competition when you need a standard test? Either the companies have to agree to a flat specification for said test, in which case you need a regulatory body anyway, or they're selling the same product, in which case they can't improve their products. Making it government-run looks like the right thing to do in this case, even though it has its own inefficiencies, because there just can't be a functional market.
I'm actually particularly good at picking up new programming languages (a little less so natural languages), so I think I have some idea about what you're facing. Learning new syntaxes and vocabularies can be quite a mental investment, especially when you're not accustomed to the process—and these aren't necessarily one in the same. I'm great at picking up new grammars and rulesets, but I could never keep up when it comes to vocabulary like physiologists or biochemists can. (And in particular, I think Kanji only persists in Japanese as a form of intentional obfuscation. It's not nearly as necessary as in Chinese. Korean has the same thing, called Hanja, and the only smart thing the North Koreans ever did was eliminate it entirely.)
That being said, though, sometimes the amount of effort required to actually pick up a language is a little deceptive. When plunged into immersion settings, it's a lot easier to justify the work. (Also, don't worry about the age thing; that's been proven to be a myth.)
No government is incorruptible. Governments are Turing-complete because they contain humans, therefore any behaviour is possible.
Sadly, it sounds like your ideal language is COBOL. There was a great deal of interest in the nineties into computer-assisted software engineering (CASE), where you drew a diagram of the code and a machine interpreted it, but there were so many possible interpretations that the complexity grew out of control, and at last count the Unified Modelling Language had well over a hundred different diagram types. Nothing beats a formal syntax for expressive power. (Also, Slashdot doesn't have a spellchecker; you probably just got a browser update foisted on you.)
Sounds like you would've been a good fit with the TUNES project which, in addition to an infinite amount of armchair pondering, would have provided something along those lines as a result of its metaprogramming goals.
(Joke about Mono here.)
Bed, yes... bed is the thing we all need.
In my opinion the worst OOP offences are what sane people call "setters" and "getters", but are what are probably called "mutators" and "accessors". To most people they're a necessary evil when you want to limit the range of values a variable can take on (although C# does this transparently with properties, which Microsoft (confusingly) recommends starting with an upper-case letter... what the hell, Microsoft?) but in Java, students are often taught to write them even when they're completely transparent and deal with primitive types that can't even be null!
As for developing new languages, mathematicians have actually contributed a great deal to CS in that department. Matlab and R represent the best-known math-centric languages, and tellingly, Matlab is very anti-theory—it can't pass variables by reference, no matter how big your matrices are. With a bit of digging, you might find that the language you really want is already out there, and already heavily-optimized. (Which is by far the biggest challenge in implementing a useful math-intensive programming environment.)
Just like in math, CS is riddled with context-specific names for refinements of the same thing. You wouldn't want to conflate a ring with a field, right? For what it's worth, though, the first OOP language, Simula, just called them "procedures" at the syntax level. And in the case of encapsulation, there really isn't a good, compact term for "writing all of your code properly so that nothing inappropriate is publicly accessible," so that was kind of a new concept that needed a new name.
But for what it's worth, I'm not a fan of OOP terminology either, and cringe whenever a Java-educated programmer uses the word "method" to describe any old subroutine. I assume there were structured programming advocates back in the early eighties who got annoyed when C programmers started calling everything "functions," even when they didn't have return values.
Irony of ironies, C# is almost exactly like Java at the language level, only with a totally different object hierarchy, which is why it's easier for UI development. The .NET hierarchy is somewhat influenced by classic VB, which was a very well-developed and efficient (if sometimes limiting) format for expressing common UI needs.
Java's popularity, sadly, has to do exactly with that OOP evangelism. In the late eighties and early nineties, academic software engineers were absolutely convinced OOP was the silver-bullet software development paradigm for all ills, since encapsulation (hiding methods) made code re-use practical. They also believed it was the end to all programming practices that inhibited re-use, particularly global variables. Unfortunately they made the mistake of conflating these practices with "laziness," and very mistakenly believed in a bizarrely Victorian fashion that all beginners should be forced to use only best practices, as though we should be teaching infants proper manners straight out of the crib.
It's stupid enough that I sometimes wonder if it was a massive conspiracy by Sun's marketing department, but to be honest computing has always been full of fads like this. In the early eighties, logic programming was The Way Of The Future; everyone thought that Prolog and constraint-satisfaction-based expert systems (basically, fancy predicate logic expression solvers) would dominate computing for the rest of time. Today, there are only a few niches where new Prolog code is considered desirable.
While the mods may not agree with you very strongly, I've seen a wealth of evidence that says Java is a bad introductory language. The CS department at my alma mater switched from an all-Java curriculum to one with a Python intro, and the student attrition rate dropped by a significant margin. A friend of mine—the daughter of two CS profs—was dead-set on avoiding programming as a teenager until I introduced her to languages other than Java.
While the formalisms and syntax are great for software engineers writing reusable and interoperable code, they're a serious blight to beginning programmers. The practice of teaching nothing but Java is probably more responsible for the post-dotcom drop in enrolment than the actual tech sector recession. Children should be taught something with a simple, easy-to-understand operating model like BASIC, Turing, or Pascal. It's frustrating to think about how much work went into programmer education in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and how it's all been thrown away just because the languages at hand were obsolete.
The subway platform was a separate example. The fact remains that biological attacks remain less effective against prepared targets than chemical ones, and are easier to prepare against. Further, I already agreed with you that a sleeper attack on civilians is (in principle) a valid move when were discussing prions; just not compatible with major real-world doctrines.
From here:
Because of the hygroscopic nature of triflic acid, handling and transfer under a dry, inert atmosphere is recommended. Contact with natural and most synthetic polymers (rubber, cork, common plastics) can lead to reaction. For this reason, storage in glass or PTFE containers is recommended.
Triflic acid vapour aggressively spreads through the air. People I've known who've worked with triflic acid describe the phenomenon as shimmering smoke, a little like a halon extinguisher. A cup of the stuff could most likely kill everyone on a crowded subway platform (i.e., hundreds of people) within a minute, by burning their lungs and pulmonary edema. The more humid the environment, the more aggressively it spreads. Handling the stuff unprotected for only a couple of seconds will cause nosebleeds. People would be dead long before they realised what was happening, eliminating the chance that they could warn others (a major problem with slow-acting biological weapons.)
Plenty of common industrial chemicals are seriously horrible, nasty stuff. While they do make PTFE-coated (teflon) hazmat suits specifically for handling spills of reagents like triflic acid, such suits are not appropriate for all toxins. One of the first things you learn in organic chemistry is that no material can protect against all chemicals.
I think that's a lot more dangerous than a theoretical maximum which is trivially capped by a shower and a standard ventilator and would take years to reach.
It's quite simple; extremely high concentrations of triflic acid can eat through anything but glass and teflon, including plastics and rubber. It spontaneously vaporizes if put in air that's even slightly humid, and the fumes can cause severe burns and blindness within seconds from several metres away. It can destroy buildings. And unlike a biological attack, everyone has to be outfitted with safety equipment; it can't be defeated by herding everyone into a room with extremely rapid ventilation.
Chemical attacks aren't nearly as versatile as traditional warfare, no, but they have much more potential to cause actual damage than biological attacks.
My idea of an effective chemical attack involves extremely vicious acid, not a toxin. Even so, chemical attacks are much faster-acting and can conceivably be employed without giving the enemy time to warn others.
I'm not sure what the point of your bombing explanation was, since that qualifies as shock and awe (against the air transit system itself) and could not be implemented with biological weapons.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be a worthwhile tactic, but it goes against the philosophy of the nuclear and chemical strikes. The bombing of Japan and the attacks on the World Trade Center both attempted to say the same thing: you are defenceless. They were shows of force, intended to make the military itself feel vulnerable. The military can thwart the second wave of biological attacks against it easily, so there's no chance of lasting intimidation. Attacking already vulnerable civilians essentially contravenes the doctrine of "shock and awe," which has been a component of successful military strategy all the way back to Sun Tzu and the Roman Empire, and is likely to create martyrs, as 9/11 did.
Well, it's the closest example of a modern disease. There were only a dozen or so cases of H5N1 transmitting between humans; there aren't any other good examples of epidemics affecting Western countries in the last few years, except maybe the 1972 Yugoslavian smallpox outbreak, in which there were only 175 cases and 35 deaths due to vaccination and quarantine.
"Modern practices" is, honestly, pretty simple: basic hygiene. Schools, bars, and public transit are all regularly sterilized. Simply washing your hands with warm water eliminates ninety percent of the bacteria on them. To contrast, there are millions of people in India who rely on the Ganges river for both drinking water and waste outflow—and it's not exactly segregated as to what goes into the river where. This is a major factor in the continued persistence of plague, cholera, and other diseases in those regions which Europeans would normally assume to be relics of history.
The spread of disease in hospitals is a completely different problem. Because keeping those places sterile is so important, we've come to rely on antibiotics that are normally very effective, but target specific mechanisms inside of the bacterial cell in order to kill it. Against these weapons, bacteria have had a chance to evolve defences, due to frequent usage but insufficient thoroughness.
Outside of The Dark Knight, creating panic is not actually an objective of terrorism. It's much more important for them to prove that they can do anything at any time, which is a useful bargaining chip. Fear is useless unless it affects those being extorted.
As for prions, it looks like vCJD may actually be practical as a weapon. Until the late nineties BSE epidemic in Britian, most known prion diseases cases were in people over the age of 55.
The only numbers we have on any prion's success rate were of the first Kuru epidemic in the late 50s. 1 in 50 people were affected; with about 90% being women, and all women being potentially exposed to the disease, it is likely that the rate of problems was around 4%. If vCJD has the same characteristics, this seems like a very low-yield strategy compared to alternatives like chemical poisoning. There are plenty of methods that would be about as untraceable, and could give much more effective, rapid results.
You're kinda beating a dead horse here, buddy.