• C Raina MacIntyre, Alison Seccull, J Michael Lane, and Aileen Plant.
• National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance of Vaccine Preventable Diseases, The Children's Hospital at Westmead and the University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
• Mil Med. 2006 Jul 1; 171 (7): 589-94.

AbstractIn developing public health policy and planning for a bioterrorist attack or vaccination of military personnel, the most common method for assigning priority is using the probability of attack with a particular agent as the single criterion. Using this approach, smallpox is often dismissed as an unlikely threat. We aimed to develop an evidence-based, systematic, multifactorial method for prioritizing the level of risk of each category A bioterrorism agent. Using 10 criterion, anthrax scored the highest, followed by smallpox. Tularemia was the lowest scoring agent. We suggest that such a system would be useful for developing public policy, stockpiling of vaccines and therapeutics, vaccination of military personnel, and planning for public health responses to a bioterrorist attack.

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