Biological Warfare - America the Unready
Source: The Economist January 23, 2000
Biowarfare could be the worst terrorist threat of all.
DOES America really face the possibility of a biological
Armageddon?
Since ABC News broadcast a television horror story in
October-terrorists tossing bottles of anthrax spores on to the tracks
of some unnamed American city's underground railway, releasing an
invisible cloud of lethal bacteria that would kill 50,000 people
within a week-nerves have been tingling even
more sharply. The programme, ABC made clear, was pure fiction, like
Orson Welles' s apocalyptic radio tale of alien assault in 1938. Yet
many viewers complained that the network was encouraging potential
terrorists. Others accused it of unnecessary theatrics.
The secretary of defence, Bill Cohen, seems to take the
matter seriously. He said recently that, if a biological attack did
come, the contagion could spread horrifyingly: doctors would be able
to offer little relief,
hospitals might become warehouses for the dead and dying. "This is not
hyperbole," Mr Cohen insisted. The head of the FBI, Louis Freeh,
talking to the Senate last year, included biological weapons among the
instruments of mass destruction that terrorist groups might well want
to use.
Yet the head of Mr Freeh's domestic-terrorism unit,
Robert Burnham, considers the risk of a biological attack to be
relatively low (though he worries about a loophole in federal law that
makes the possession of bioweapons like anthrax perfectly legal). And
the sceptics point out that America's armed forces, understandably
wanting more money to protect
the country against such horrors, are unlikely to play down the
danger.
One anti-sceptic is Donald Henderson, director of the
Centre for Civilian Biodefence Studies at Johns Hopkins University,
who believes that the threat of bioterrorism has increased in recent
years. He dismisses the widely held view that the scientific expertise
required to produce and disperse
lethal organisms is within the reach of only the most sophisticated
laboratories. "Recipes for making biological weapons are available on
the Internet," he argues, "and even groups with modest finances and
basic training in biology and engineering could develop an effective
weapon at little cost."
The Japanese cult-group Aum Shinrikyo is best known for
its 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, but it is
believed that it also planned to use biological weapons against
American troops in Japan. Its arsenal is said to have included large
amounts of nutrient media, botulinum toxin
and anthrax cultures, besides drone aircraft equipped with spray
tanks.
Dr Henderson says that two familiar microbes, smallpox
and anthrax, are the most formidable threats. Anthrax, with a fatality
rate of 80-90%, could knock out an entire city. Smallpox is also a
killer of mind-boggling proportions: when the campaign to eradicate it
began, in 1967, it was killing 2m people a year. And, unlike anthrax,
smallpox is a highly
communicable disease; it can spread like wildfire.
For the most part, smallpox was exterminated decades
ago. That has a benefit and a disadvantage. The benefit is that
"casual" terrorists would have great difficulty getting hold of it
(officially, the only remaining stocks are held at one laboratory in
America and one in Russia, though there are
probably a few secret hoards in military laboratories around the
world). The disadvantage is that the disease's disappearance means
that there is not much vaccine around. The United States stopped
vaccinating people in 1972, and about 90% of the population now lacks
smallpox immunity. A major city could quickly be overrun by a disease
in which one out of three people
would die.
It would not take many such outbreaks to overwhelm the
country's medical system. The Centre for Civilian Biodefence Studies
says that, even if at first only 50 people were infected, the result
could be a nationwide epidemic. Cities lack the isolation facilities
needed to prevent the contagion spreading. In Washington, DC, for
example, there are only about
100 hospital beds that could provide proper isolation of infected
patients. If your spine is not yet tingling enough, reflect that the
United States possesses nowhere near enough reserves of smallpox
vaccine. It currently has about 15m doses to hand, but maybe only
about half of these are usable. If more vaccine were needed, it would
take up to a year to produce: at present no manufacturing capacity
exists.
All this points to a serious gap in the country's
preparedness to deal with a biological-weapons threat, despite the
Clinton administration's efforts to increase anti-terrorism spending
over the past two years. According to some doctors, the problem is
partly one of priorities. Testifying to Congress recently, Tara
O'Toole of the Johns Hopkins University School of
Public Health said that anti-terrorism programmes have concentrated
chiefly on the threat posed by conventional explosives or chemical
weapons. Yet biological terrorism may not only be likelier than
before; it is also far more threatening than either explosives or
chemicals. Whereas the worst effects
of a chemical or explosive attack are soon over, the devastation
following a smallpox or anthrax outbreak can continue for weeks or
months as the contagion goes on spreading.
An effective response would need lots of money. Yet for
the current fiscal year the Department of Health and Human Services is
requesting only $230m out of a total anti-terrorism budget of $10
billion-much less than President
Clinton asked for when, 18 months ago, he announced a plan for a
national response to terrorist incidents involving chemical or
biological weapons.
Ms O'Toole says that hardly any American cities have
practised their response to a biological attack. Even when
bioterrorism scenarios are considered, she claims, hospital leaders
and public-health experts are frequently excluded from the training
sponsored by federal agencies. She wants the government to do much
more to develop national pharmaceutical and
vaccine stockpiles and to improve disease-surveillance systems.
Michael Osterholm, a former Minnesota state epidemiologist, is even
blunter. "We have a substantial national response to terrorism. The
problem is they forgot to include a meaningful biological component."
A small military task force has now been set up, under
Brigadier-General Bruce Lawlor, to help the civilians work out what to
do if the worst happens. Yet perhaps even this does not address the
real nightmare-that a genetically engineered pathogen might be set
loose deliberately. Against that there would be no vaccine, and
probably no handy antidote. And genetic
technology is getting cheaper by the day.
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