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UNITED STATES
Biological warfare
America the unready N E W Y O R K
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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Science-Savior, But Also Dangerous
In The Hands of The Military Or Unstable Individuals