Biological warfare: the history of microbial pathogens, biotoxins and emerging threats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bioterrorism is the deliberate misuse of a pathogen (virus, bacterium or other disease-causing microorganisms) or biotoxin (poisonous substance produced by an organism) to cause illness and death amongst the population. Bioterrorism and biological warfare (biowarfare) are terms often used interchangeably. However, bioterrorism is typically attributed to the politically motivated use of biological weapons by a rogue state, terrorist organisation or rogue individual whereas biological warfare refers to a country’s use of bioweapons. Although rare, bioterrorism is a rapidly evolving threat to global security due to significant advancements in biotechnology in recent years and the severity of agents that could be exploited. The pursuit of publicity plays a vital role in bioterrorism. The success of a biological attack is often calculated by the extent of terror resulting from the event, psychological disruption of society and political breakdown, rather than the lethal effects of the agent used.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".