Terror in the Air Source: The Star February 25, 2001
It's getting easier to mass-produce deadly biological
weapons; at the same time, supplies of vaccines to counter such killer
viruses
As the 21st century gets under way, the following
nations possess biological weapons: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, China,
North Korea, Russia, Israel and Taiwan. It's possible that Sudan,
India, Pakistan and Kazakhstan also have them.
The list cuts across lines of ideology, politics and
geography. In addition, according to intelligence sources in Europe
and the United States, militant political groups around the globe are
now developing or seeking to purchase biological weapons for terrorist
use.
Meanwhile, the sophistication of biological weaponry has
improved by leaps and bounds.
Until 1985, all of the world's biological-weapons makers
were stuck with the same list of pathogens and toxins that could kill
thousands of enemies and be delivered with missiles or large-scale
aerosol systems. Each nation knew the list and stocked antidotes and
vaccines. It was a standoff.
But biology in the last decade has been what physics was
in the 1940s and 1950s: a field of exponential discovery. What seemed
impossible in 1980 was accomplished by 1990 and, by 2000, had become
ho-hum fodder for high school biology classes.
By the late 1990s, a massive pool of bioengineers had
emerged, equipped with genetic blueprints to guide their efforts.
Determining the genetic sequence of a virus, such as Ebola, was no
longer much of a feat. In 1998, scientists at the Frederick Cancer
Research Centre in Maryland determined, at the genetic level, exactly
how anthrax kills human cells.
Just last week, a science conference in San Francisco
was told that researchers are close to producing artificial viruses, a
development that could be misused in the wrong hands.
`If smallpox is totally destroyed, someone could make
smallpox again' ``If smallpox is totally destroyed, someone could make
smallpox again,'' American microbiologist Clyde Hutchinson told the
conference.
Jonathan Moreno, a biotechnology ethicist, said
artificial viruses could lead to frightening new weapons.
``It obviously goes directly to the question of
biological (warfare) agents,'' he said.
In response to such advances, Western nations are
hardening their military defences against biological warfare as they
vaccinate troops, stockpile antitoxins, store appropriate antibiotics,
purchase protective suits and masks, practise war-game drills
involving biological weapons and support research on potential
microbe-detecting devices.
But no one has a master plan for dealing with the
collateral impact of biological weapons on civilians located around
the combat zone - or the deliberate impact of bioterrorist damage
inflicted on an unsuspecting community.
Were a terrorist to disperse the smallpox virus, for
example, populations that were once universally vaccinated would now
be horribly vulnerable.
Today, the U.S. government stows only about 15.4 million
doses of the smallpox vaccine - enough for less than 7 per cent of the
American population.
The World Health Organization (WHO) keeps another
500,000 doses in the Netherlands, and other national stockpiles total
about 60 million more doses of varying quality and potency.
(In Ontario, a spokesperson for the provincial health
ministry says the government has no stockpiles of smallpox vaccine.)
If the smallpox virus were released today, the majority
of the world's population would be defenceless. Given the virus' 30
per cent kill rate, nearly 2 billion people could die.
The picture worsened in 1999, when scientists discovered
that the U.S. samples of the smallpox vaccine had severely
deteriorated.
Originally made in the 1970s by the Wyeth pharmaceutical
company, the samples were stored at the Centres for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta in the form of freeze-dried crystals
parcelled out in 100-dose quantities inside vacuum-sealed glass tubes.
The tubes were further sealed with rubber stoppers secured by metal
clamps.
To their dismay, CDC investigators discovered
condensation in many of the glass tubes, indicating that the rubber
stoppers had decayed and vacuum pressure had been lost. Such vaccine
supplies can no longer be considered safe for human use.
The rest of the world's vaccine reserves have not
undergone similar scrutiny, but experts don't have much confidence in
those, either.
Furthermore, the world's supplies of bifurcated
needles - uniquely designed for scratch-administering the smallpox
vaccine on human skin - have been depleted and companies are no longer
interested in manufacturing such specialized devices.
The world is thus completely vulnerable to a smallpox
attack.
The last time a mass emergency vaccination took place in
the United States was 1947, when a traveller from Mexico spread
smallpox to New York City. Vaccines were then readily available and
6.35 million New Yorkers were immunized in less than four weeks.
In 1961, a similar vaccination campaign was administered
following a smallpox outbreak in England: 5.5 million people were
immunized in a month's time. A decade later, smallpox cases in
Yugoslavia prompted the rapid vaccination of 20 million people.
Were a smallpox crisis to emerge today, none of these
efforts could be repeated.
Even if large stockpiles of the smallpox vaccine could
be collected immediately, they would be of limited value for two
reasons: Victims would develop recognizable symptoms only several days
after infection, by which time thousands - even millions - of people
would have been exposed; and people would develop sufficient
antibodies to stave off infection only several days or weeks after
vaccination.
For other diseases preventable by vaccine, such as
anthrax, the lag time between inoculation and the development of
powerful antibodies could be far longer - up to a year, even with
boosters.
And, of course, immunization efforts would be useless
against vaccine-resistant pathogens, such as those created by
scientists in the former Soviet Union working on anthrax weapons.
Furthermore, a determined bioterrorist could simply try
a succession of microbial weapons - or use a cocktail at the outset -
defying even the best-organized vaccination programs.
The cost of a delayed response to an anthrax attack
would be staggering, explains CDC economist Martin Meltzer.
In a city of 100,000 people, Meltzer says, the number of
deaths would be 5,000 if a vaccination program began on the day after
an attack, ``versus 35,000 on day six.''
Cities large and small, then, should start stockpiling
relevant antibiotics, vaccines and general medical supplies.
But even if cities were well-equipped for a bioterrorist
attack, they still would have a difficult time recognizing that such
an attack had occurred.
Local authorities ``probably aren't going to be able to
recognize it has happened . . . until the incubation period is over,''
says Clark Staten, executive director of the Emergency Response and
Research Institute in Chicago.
``And by then, you've got it spread over a wide area.
And it may take longer to recognize there's a pattern going on.''
Once an outbreak is recognized, an epidemiologist would
be dispatched to identify the cause. If the pathogen were fairly
common, like Clostridium botulinum (the bacterium that causes
botulism, a potentially fatal food poisoning), local hospital
laboratories could probably identify the culprit quickly.
But if the microbes were rare, like those that cause
anthrax, Q fever, Ebola, smallpox or the plague, local facilities
would probably be unable to diagnose the problem.
With precious time passing, people dying and disease
possibly spreading, local officials would then have to await word from
the diagnostic labs at the CDC.
If the suspected pathogen were highly deadly, like the
smallpox virus, the analysis would be handled in the CDC's Special
Pathogens laboratory, which is normally staffed by fewer than a dozen
highly specialized scientists. And during a crisis, it would be
difficult to find qualified supplementary staff to scale up
operations.
During the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Zaire, for example,
the lab was staffed by a mere six scientists who toiled around the
clock trying to identify the presence of the lethal virus in some
30,000 tissue, blood, plant, insect and animal samples.
In the case of a bioterrorist attack, valuable time -
and lives - might be lost during such an arduous process.
In a large urban centre, the true costs of a
bioterrorist attack might be the consequences of panic, such as a
stock market collapse in New York or a commodities market crash in
Chicago.
Handfuls of Internet-hooked extremists, right-wing
militia members, psychologically unbalanced belligerents and
postmodern Fascists are well-versed in the fine points of
bioterrorism.
Recipes for producing botulinum and anthrax are posted
on the Web. Books describing biological-warfare assassination
techniques are readily available. Some private militia groups in the
U.S. train to use biological weapons.
Indeed, law-enforcement leaders claim that American
religious cults and militant political groups are likely to engage in
biological terrorism.
After all, they argue, the first bioterrorist attack in
the U.S. was carried out by members of an Oregon-based religious cult
led by Bagwan Shree Rajneesh.
The cult members, hoping to disrupt an upcoming county
election, contaminated local salad bars with salmonella, infecting
hundreds of Oregonians.
Perhaps it is the tone of some militants' rhetoric that
sparks the most concern.
In The Poisoner's Handbook, for example, Maxwell
Hutchkinson suggests that readers poison or kill Internal Revenue
Service workers by filling out phony tax-return forms and lacing them
with a mixture of ricin (a poisonous protein) and dimethylsulfoxide
(DMSO) - a concoction Hutchkinson claims is 100-per-cent lethal.
``The purpose of all this is to disrupt the operations''
of the IRS, Hutchkinson writes. ``If done on a large-enough scale, it
would serve two purposes - it would make it more difficult for the IRS
to operate efficiently, thus helping tax cheats and tax protesters. It
might also awaken the politicians to the depth of resentment felt by
the taxpaying public.''
Fortunately, Hutchkinson is a lousy chemist: Only simple
chemicals - not proteins such as ricin - can dissolve in DMSO.
But the depth of his antagonism is unmistakable. He
suggests that readers kill Catholics by soaking their victims' rosary
beads in phytotoxin abrin, a toxin derived from a rare bean.
He writes that botulinum is ``fun and easy to make'' and
he urges survivalists around the world to hone their skills, readying
themselves for biological warfare in the coming Armageddon.
In response to such threats, the U.S. Congress has
passed a number of laws aimed at making it harder for anyone -
domestic or foreign - to attack the U.S. with biological weapons.
In 1989, Congress passed the Biological Weapons Act,
outlawing the possession, trade, sale or manufacture of a biological
substance ``for use as a weapon.''
In 1991, it enacted an embargo, soon enforced against
Iraq, barring U.S. companies from trading with countries believed to
be developing biological weapons.
After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Congress passed
the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, allowing federal authorities to arrest
anyone who even ``threatens'' to develop or use biological weapons.
And the following year, by order of Congress, the CDC
named 24 infectious organisms and 12 toxins as ``restricted agents,''
the use or possession of which requires a federal permit.
Although these measures provide legal instruments for
federal law-enforcement officials, it is impossible to judge how
effectively they have, or have not, deterred biological terrorism.
The administration of former president Bill Clinton
hoped to stave off the worst threats by training the National Guard
and local hazardous-material defence teams to rapidly respond to
bioterrorist attacks.
But the teams, comprising elite local police squads and
fire department personnel, handled chemical and biological threats as
if they were roughly synonymous - a fatal mistake, according to
biologists.
Having been trained in techniques for limiting the
spread of lethal chemicals, the defence teams assumed that a visible
source of contamination could be identified, that exposed individuals
could be isolated and that a toxin could be swiftly cleared out of the
environment with water or neutralizing chemicals.
None of these assumptions holds true for lethal
microbes, biologists point out, because their long incubation periods
in potentially contagious human beings render it nearly impossible to
identify and contain a source.
Furthermore, ``washing'' an area contaminated with
pathogens might only spread them.
Even the simplest technological defence against
biological weapons has proven to be too much for department of defence
contractors.
Last spring, Pentagon officials revealed that the
protective suits U.S. troops had relied on during the Persian Gulf War
(and that still form the basis of soldiers' defence against deadly
microbes) were defective.
At least 5 per cent of the 900,000 suits the Pentagon
had purchased during the 1990s were useless and the reliability of the
entire inventory was suspect.
It seems unlikely, then, that a technological quick fix
will soon be found. The three immediate U.S. responses to
bioterrorism - military defence, hazardous-material defence teams and
high-technology sensors - appear to be seriously flawed.
Published by Foreign Affairs Magazine. Adapted from
Laurie Garrett's book Betrayal Of Trust: The Collapse Of Global Public
Health.
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- Clyde Hutchinson, microbiologist