Anthrax has been documented in existence since Egyptian times, and has been studied extensively in modern times -- both for medical reasons and biochemical warfare.

During World War II, Britain tested anthrax-laden explosives at Gruinard Island off Scotland. In 1979, hundreds of residents of a Russian city of fell ill with flu-like symptoms. About 66 died. Years later a Harvard biologist found that upwind of where the illnesses occurred was a Soviet facility that was making anthrax. It wasn't until 1992 that Boris Yeltsin admitted that the former Soviet Union had a large biological weapons program.

From 1990 to 1993, a cult in Japan deliberately released anthrax spores four times, but the releases caused no fatalities.

The Ames strain of anthrax (believed to be possibly connected to the Boca Raton exposures) was developed in the 1930s from an animal culture at Iowa State.

For decades, the Ames strain was passed around freely to university and other researchers because it grows well in culture dishes and is considered as a benchmark for identifying anthrax, according to Norman Cheville, dean of Iowa State's college of veterinary medicine. Researchers at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have also studied it for years and have distributed it periodically to university researchers.

Today, federal law significantly limits U.S. culture collections in their ability to distribute any infectious microbes or toxins that have been designated by federal officials as possible bioterrorism agents, including Bacillus anthracis.

But the U.S. isn't the only location where anthrax is found. According to Amy E. Smithson, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, "there are more than 500 culture collections around the world."

The World Federation for Culture Collections has a registry of 473 collections of microbes in 62 countries. 46 of them listed B. anthracis as being available to scientists. The regulations or procedures governing who can get a dangerous microbe differ from country to country.

Anyone wishing to receive such agents must register with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Registrants must prove they have a legitimate use for the agents, provide signatures with every order and open their labs to inspections.

Individual violators can be fined $250,000 or sent to jail for one year.

But collections and research labs are not the only way to obtain lethal microbes. Besides B. anthracis, for example, can be found in the soil and on livestock. It should be noted that it takes scientitific knowledge to work with bacteria - it is not something that could be accomplished in a kitchen by someone without training. Weaponizing anthrax is an even more complex process, and would typically only be a process done with the financing of a government or wealthy backer.

So - short answer - there are a lot of places to find anthrax, but few legitimate ways to acquire it, and few people who would be able to use it for bioterrorism if they were able to get a hold of it.

Complied from encarta, Dept. of Defense, Washington Post, CDC, Dept. of Health