Biological Warfare Nothing to Sneeze At -- 03/29/1999

Biological Warfare Nothing to Sneeze At

29 March, 1999

By Bruce Sullivan
CNS Staff Writer

(CNS) – Weapons of mass destruction come in all shapes and sizes, from nuclear warheads, to canisters of sarin nerve gas, to petri dishes.

Anthrax, smallpox, bubonic plague, and a host of other deadly diseases can in theory be used by terrorists to kill millions of people. Has it happened yet? No, but President Clinton is concerned enough about bioterrorism to have proposed that over $180 million of the 2000 budget be spent on biowarfare vaccine research and on strengthening the public health response to biological attacks.

The Senate will soon be holding hearings on the matter, led by Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), who chairs the subcommittee on Public Health and Safety. Frist said that the probability of biological terrorism is low, but "the United States is very, very vulnerable."

The logistics of germ warfare are not as simple as they are depicted in novels such as Alistair MacLean's The Satan Bug, in which a teaspoonful of powdered, deadly bacteria could be released into the air and trigger a plague that destroys all life on the planet.

Historically, there have been only two documented cases of the military use of germ warfare. The first occurred in 1763, at the height of the French and Indian War, when Lord Amherst ordered his British officers to give American Indians, who were allied with the enemy French, smallpox-contaminated blankets–an action that caused a major outbreak of the deadly disease that killed as many colonists and British soldiers as Indians. Then, in 1932 the Japanese Imperial Army conducted human biological warfare experiments on prisoners in occupied China.

Though five pounds of anthrax bacteria in the hands of a terrorist could be used to kill half the population of Washington, D.C., as Secretary of Defense William Cohen once illustrated with a bag of sugar, he pointed out that it could only happen if the anthrax was efficiently distributed.

Distributing or disseminating biological agents is the single biggest problem for would-be terrorists. The germs can be grown in small labs, much smaller than the facilities required for nuclear or even chemical weapons. But delivering the bugs to a large, unsuspecting population is not as simple as loading up a few aerosol cans or paint sprayers and letting loose. The drops quickly fall to the ground or just blow in the wrong direction, as the U.S. military discovered in tests before abandoning its biowar program in the early 1970s.

Delivering the biological agents through the water supply is also logistically difficult. Unless terrorists are able to dump tons of contaminated material into public reservoirs they will be too diluted to infect healthy people.

"It's not easy to contaminate a city's water supply," Col. Gerald W. Parker, commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases told National Journal.

If the delivery obstacles are overcome, or if terrorists develop new, virulent strains of bacteria that can more easily be used to infect large numbers of people, then there will be a problem, according to U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher.

Satcher says that our public health infrastructure has deteriorated so much that there may not be enough facilities or trained personnel to handle a bio attack.

"We've got to have the basic health infrastructure, even before we start to worry about bioterrorism," said Satcher.

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