Your food is safe from terrorists. Mostly.

While threats of terrorism receives lots of attention, a discreet attack on our food and/or water supply would likely have just as devastating results. Fortunately, academics are on the case. How easy would it be for terrorists to launch a widespread food attack? Not very easy, it turns out.

A professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has studied the 365 confirmed cases of “malicious food contamination” worldwide since 1950. Nearly three-fourths of the attacks are at the end of the food-supply chain, such as the grocery store, and are carried out “typically by a friend, relative, neighbor, or co-worker trying to kill or injure a specific person. … Most of these cases resulted in fewer than five casualties. … Of the 19 cases that claimed 10 or more lives, four involved

serial killers operating over several years.”

But terrorists are likely to have grander plans than sticking needles in some apple fritters. So far there are few cases of attempted large-scale bioterrorism, and none have been very successful. “The closest example occurred in 1984 in the United States where members of a

religious group known as the Rajneeshees contaminated several

restaurant salad bars with salmonella enterica typhimurium, sickening

751, hospitalizing 45, but killing no one. In fact, no one knew this

was malicious until a year later, when one of the perpetrators admitted

it.”

The military and CIA seem to have concluded that a bioterror attack would be too tough to pull off and they are more worried about individual assassination attempts like that on Alexander Litvinenko who was killed in London with polonium-210.

For regular nonassassination targets like you and me, the biggest threat isn’t overt terrorism, it’s lax safety rules like those in several developing countries. The number of people killed by malicious food attacks is tiny compared to the number killed in 2008 by melamine alone.