Sheltering Effects of Buildings from Biological Weapons

This paper focuses on the question of how much protection a building provides its inhabitants from a BW attack. The reason for considering this problem is simple: most people spend the majority of their daily lives inside buildings. In fact, the U.S. EPA estimates that average Americans spend approximately 87% of their time indoors.5 However, most previous technical assessments of BW incidents ignore the effects of buildings, computing casualties based only on integrated outdoor surface dosage. The protective effects of buildings have been considered for other toxic releases. Karlsson, for example, looks at the effects of indoor deposition upon toxic gas clouds,6 and Engelmann7 and others examine the sheltering effectiveness of buildings against respirable plutonium releases. In this paper we seek to extend these basic ideas to biological agents and to explore aspects of the problem that are unique to biological weapons.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: A brief discussion of general aspects of biological weapons is first presented. Then, we introduce the method used to model the penetration of buildings by biological agents and discuss the factors that determine the sheltering effectiveness of a particular building. The paper concludes with a discussion of simple measures that individuals can enact to increase the sheltering effectiveness of a particular building.