Ricin particularly susceptible to false positive test results
According to information presented on Chris Hayes tonight.
At time likes like this, people see threats in everything, and the media is reporting about left bags and letters than typically do not draw much attention. Keep that in mind when you hear these stories.
Here is an article about two recent false positives. http://gawker.com/5994835/two-recent-high+profile-false-positives-for-ricin
"Early Tuesday evening, news broke that a letter sent to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) tested positive for the deadly poison ricin. Considering yesterday's bombings and the deadly anthrax-filled letters sent after 9/11, this is scary stuff, right? Maybe. But there's a history of false positives with ricin.
The most notable case occurred in January of 2003, when investigators found what they then believed to be traces of ricin during a raid of the London apartment of alleged al Qaeda operatives. Authorities used the discovery – from a mortar and pestle in the apartment – to declare the suspects a "poison cell." Despite the fact that the apartment contained the ingredients necessary to make ricin – including castor beans and acetone – as well as instructions, it was later discovered that the substance found was not ricin. Of course, this discovery, which was made shortly after the raid, was not publicly revealed until April 2005, over two years later.
In the two years before the false positive was publicly disclosed, public officials in the UK and the United States used the false positive to connect the five men arrested to eventual al Qaeda member Abu Musab Zarqawi, whom the US was then attempting to link to Saddam Hussein and a camp in Iraq where ricin was made."
