Inhaled prions have extremely long incubation times (years), so it would be possible for an attacker to expose huge numbers of people unknowingly to them. The disease it causes is slow and insidious, and as of today, there is no way to detect it until post-mortem. There’s no treatment, either. I’m not certain of the procedure for making prions in massive quantities in the laboratory, but since they are self-replicating if placed in a medium containing the respective protein, they probably could be mass-produced.
On the bright side, the disease would not be self-replicating in the wild, so it would not be an existential risk—merely a very nasty way to cause mass casualties. Also, this method has never been tested on humans, so it might not be very effective, so one can hope that terrorists will stick with bombs.
An example of a nasty trick that would make for a relatively easy to produce and deploy bio-weapon : http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1001257
Inhaled prions have extremely long incubation times (years), so it would be possible for an attacker to expose huge numbers of people unknowingly to them. The disease it causes is slow and insidious, and as of today, there is no way to detect it until post-mortem. There’s no treatment, either. I’m not certain of the procedure for making prions in massive quantities in the laboratory, but since they are self-replicating if placed in a medium containing the respective protein, they probably could be mass-produced.
On the bright side, the disease would not be self-replicating in the wild, so it would not be an existential risk—merely a very nasty way to cause mass casualties. Also, this method has never been tested on humans, so it might not be very effective, so one can hope that terrorists will stick with bombs.