A University of Arizona researcher has created a new system to dramatically show American cities their relative level of vulnerability to bioterrorism.
Walter W Piegorsch, an expert on environmental risk, has placed 132 major cities from Albany, New York to Youngstown, Ohio on a colour-coded map that identifies their level of risk based on factors, including critical industries, ports, railroads, population, natural environment and other factors.
A professor of mathematics in the College of Science and member of the UA's BIO5 Institute, Piegorsch has created a map that marks high-risk areas as red (for example, Houston and Boise), mid-range risk as yellow (San Francisco) and lower risk as green (Tucson).
The map showed a wide swath of highest-risk urban areas running from New York down through the Southeast and into Texas. Boise was the only high-risk urban area that lies outside the swath.
The research, published in the journal Risk Analysis,