March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Biological warfare threat real

At the height of the Cold War, bomb shelters dotted the landscape and schoolchildren were regularly instructed how to take shelter under their desks in case of a nuclear attack. The Cold War is now a memory but a new threat has arisen, one that could prove far more dangerous to Americans than ever did the missles of the Soviet Union. The new threat is not of hostile nations getting nuclear material from the old Soviet arsenal but one that can kill innocent people by the millions while leaving their property unscathed. The new threat is that of biological terrorism. As Robert Taylor writes in a recent issue of New Scientist, biological warfare can be unleashed at minimal cost and technical expertise and with no effective defenses currently in place.

A report in the May 18 issue of Science News says that it would cost less than $100,000, and require the expertise of five biologists, to assemble a biological weapon in a few weeks. Just as nuclear material is the heart of an atomic weapon, bacterial cultures are the basis of biological weapons and you may be both surprised and alarmed to learn just how easy these cultures are to obtain. Just how easy became clear in March 1995 when a microbiologist, who is also a member of the Aryan Nations white supremacist group, ordered a culture of the bacterium that causes bubonic plague through the mail! The American Type Culture Collection, a clearing house for bacterial cultures, dutifully prepared the samples for shipment until a staff member became suspicious. The federal government is prosecuting the microbiologist, not for trying to obtain plague germs which is legal, but for using a forged letterhead from a legitimate research firm.

There are many deadly strains of bacteria, such as bubonic plague, botulism, and gas gangrene that might be incorporated into a terrorist weapon but none is more feared than anthrax. Anthrax is a disease of cattle and sheep but it can also attack humans. Early symptoms include vomiting, fever, and difficulty in breathing. Without prompt treatment with antibiotics, death will occur in a matter of days from hemorrhage, respiratory failure, and toxic shock. The carnage that could be caused by a terrorist attack using anthrax is almost beyond comprehension. The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment says that a crop duster flying over Washington, and armed with 100 kilograms of dried anthrax spores, has the potentiality of fatally infecting up to three million people. Because of a brief incubation period before symptoms began to appear, it might not even be known that an attack took place until victims began to fall ill. Meanwhile those exposed could carry the disease to untold numbers of others.

Just such an attack on a major population center has already been contemplated by a terrorist organization. When police raided the labs of the Alum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that carried out the poison gas attack in the Tokyo subway system, they found evidence that anthrax and botulin cultures were being grown. Raymond Zilinskas of the University of Maryland’s Biotechnology Institute says that, if the cult had left a crude slurry of anthrax spores in the tunnels of the subway system where passing trains would have both dried and carried them airborne, it could have cost the lives of nearly everyone riding the subways over several days. In fact, the sarin gas attack may have been an experiment to test the air activity in the system for later release of anthrax or other bacterium. The Iranian government ran five labs producing anthrax and other biological weapons until a defector blew the whistle in 1995.

According to Taylor, any skilled microbiologist could isolate anthrax from infected animals and grow cultures in nothing more complex than covered fish tanks. Freeze-drying apparatus, to convert the wet slurries to a dry powder, are readily obtainable from manufacturers of food-processing equipment. In fact, the biggest obstacle for the would-be terrorist is to avoid accidental release of the spores thus becoming the first victim of the process. Thus far, writes Taylor, government officials have taken a “head-in-the-sand” approach to this new threat to American security. Office of Emergency Preparedness official Frank Young told a 1995 Senate hearing, “that there is no coordinated public health infrastructure to deal with the medical consequences of biological terrorism.”

Clair Wood is a science instructor at Eastern Maine Technical College and the NEWS science columnist.


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