Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat
Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat - Milton Leitenberg. US Army Strategic Studies Institute monograph, December 2005. It is nearly 15 years since biological weapons (BW) have become a significant national security preoccupation. This occurred primarily due to circumstances occurring within a short span of years. First was the official U.S. Government suggestion that proliferation of offensive BW programs among states and even terrorist groups was an increasing trend; second was the discovery, between 1989 and 1992, that the Union USSR had violated the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) since its ratification in 1975 by building a massive covert biological weapons program; third was the corroboration by the UN Special Commission in 1995 that Iraq had maintained a covert biological weapons program since 1974, and had produced and stockpiled large quantities of agents and delivery systems between 1988 and 1991; and, fourth was the discovery, also in 1995, that the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group, which had carried out the nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway system, also had spent 4 years attempting—albeit unsuccessfully—to produce and disperse two pathogenic biological agents. The distribution of professionally prepared anthrax spores through the U.S. postal system in the weeks afterwards September 11, 2001, magnified previous concerns by orders of magnitude. In December 2002, after U.S. forces had overrun much of the territory of Afghanistan, it was discovered that the al-Qaida organization also had spent several years trying to obtain the knowledge and means to produce biological agents. These new factors shifted the context in which BW was considered almost entirely to “bioterrorism.” Within 4 years, almost $30 billion in federal expenditure was appropriated to counter the anticipated threat. This response took place in the absence of virtually any threat analysis. The purpose of this monograph is to begin to fill that gap.
Now this is a statement with which I can wholeheartedly agree.
Quote:
Mother Nature is the most dangerous terrorist. The microbial world is almost unlimited in its [terrorist] potential
Bioengineering pathogens is at the extremes of our abilities (man’s that is) we have recently 'created life' from scratch for the first time. This was a fairly big deal but all we did was manufacture some DNA to match that of another organism, we do not know enough to make even minor changes to the genetic sequence and be able to predict the effects. The money thrown at bio-terrorism has had two effects (well three if you include that it was diverted from some where it might have done more good) firstly it has probably increased the threat to US citizens from dangerous biological agents by vastly increasing the number of US labs licensed to work with dangerous pathogens. There has, naturally enough, been a commensurate increase in the number of lab accidents, researchers infected etc. (link to post on Texas A&M University lab failures that eventually made the CDC do something). The second, and beneficial effect, of bio-terrorism research has been the fact that a lot of it is dual use and could be of genuine benefit in what is the far greater, and very real danger, posed by zoonotic emergence - H5N1 being the poster-boy candidate. In this field, to paraphrase Ex. Sec. Rumsfeld, it is the known unknowns that we should be losing sleep over HIV/AIDS, SARS, Nipah, Ebola/Marburg etc. are all recent zoonotics. None of our (human) communicable diseases was originally a human disease from Yellow fever & Smallpox to cold & flu they have all been acquired by humans from - and since - the domestication of animals.
H5N1 an object lesson.
For the first time in history we have been given forewarning of an impending zoonotic emergence and it is a humbling (humiliating might be closer) lesson in how poor a match our technology is to this very basic virus' ability to mutate away from any solution we may try and develop. HIV is a classical zoonotic pandemic and despite the research effort over a quarter of a century this is the first year in which we may have broken even. A flu pandemic would follow the same course but due to the difference in its transmission method would reach the same point in the pandemic cycle in about three months. We have no vaccines and no likelihood of producing any in the foreseeable future, we have one antiviral (Tamiflu) that has shown some usefulness (not a cure but can reduce symptoms) but resistance is rapidly developing in seasonal flu and most epidemiological models show this becoming the norm early in a pandemic. Here is an enemy that is a truly worthy advisory only full scale nuclear war can come close to matching its potential for destruction of our cosy human existence.
Y’all have a nice day now.
Dutch Researcher Created A Super-Influenza Virus With The Potential To Kill Millions
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A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet’s population. Now, researchers and experts in bioterrorism debate whether it is a good idea to publish the virus creation ”recipe”. However, several voices argue that such research should have not happened in the first place.
The virus is a strain of avian influenza H5N1 genetically modified to be extremely contagious. It was created by researcher Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, Netherlands. The work was first presented at a conference dedicated to influenza, that took place in September in Malta.
http://www.doctortipster.com/6952-du...-millions.html
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In a 17th floor office in the same building, virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center calmly explains why his team created what he says is "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make"—and why he wants to publish a paper describing how they did it.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencein...orm.html?rss=1
See also
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The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.
http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
The Bioterrorist Next Door
From FP Blog and possibly a better title would be 'What is the bio-scientist doing in the lab?'.
A long article and hardly calming:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article..._door?page=0,0
The Dutch experiment appears to have reached Hilary Clinton's desk; slightly edited comments she made:
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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a surprise visit to Geneva on Dec. 7, addressing the Biological Weapons Convention review conference. The highest-ranking U.S. official to speak to the biological weapons group in decades, Clinton warned "The emerging gene-synthesis industry is making genetic material widely available. This obviously has many benefits for research, but it could also potentially be used to assemble the components of a deadly organism.
A crude but effective terrorist weapon can be made by using a small sample of any number of widely available pathogens, inexpensive equipment, and college-level chemistry and biology. Less than a year ago, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula made a call to arms for, and I quote, 'brothers with degrees in microbiology or chemistry to develop a weapon of mass destruction".
In the UK in a different field, radiology, much effort is spent on physical defences, but vetting the staff - at universities - is not included.
I do wonder whether the "bubble" of 'trust me, I'm a scientist' is redundant.