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By Rick Weiss
It would require just a small private
plane, not a hijacked commercial jetliner. A helper could
casually dump a bag of powdery bacterial spores while in flight,
rather than having to overpower a planeload of passengers.
And the team could land and be home in time for dinner instead
of ending it all in a suicidal inferno.
It's called bioterrorism,
and experts say it would be a lot easier to conduct and is
more likely to occur in
the next few years than a replay of last week's terrorist
tragedies.
A small cloud of bacteria or viruses
could easily and silently infect tens of thousands of people,
triggering fatal outbreaks of anthrax, smallpox, pneumonic
plague or any of a dozen other deadly diseases. And victims
infected with contagious ailments could pass the microbes
to thousands of others before doctors even figured out what
was going on.
Moreover, bioterrorism could foment political instability,
given the panic that fast-moving plagues have historically
engendered.
"The events in New York and Washington were tragedies
beyond what anyone had previously imagined, but the potential
of biological terrorism is far greater in terms of loss of
life and disruption," said Michael Osterholm, director
of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease
Research and Policy. "It would be less graphic -- no
flames and explosions -- but much more insidious. Anyone with
a cough would be a weapon."
In many respects the nation is less
prepared for bioterrorism than it is for conventional acts
of terrorism. An October 1999 General Accounting
Office (GAO) report documented major gaps in the nation's
system for protecting itself against biological attacks. Inspectors
found shortages of vaccines and medicines, stockrooms filled
with expired drugs, and lax security measures where crucial
drugs were stored.
A January 2001 report by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta concluded that the nation's public
health infrastructure is "not adequate to detect and
respond to a bioterrorist event."
And a March 2001 GAO report noted that 20 percent of the nation's
pharmaceutical and medical supplies held by the federal Office
of Emergency Preparedness for a bioterrorist attack were stored
in a vault whose temperature was 95 degrees and that had no
air-conditioning. The medicines' potency could be assured
only if kept cooler than 86 degrees.
Some improvements have been implemented since then. Still,
the nation and the world are largely unprepared to fight major
outbreaks of deadly diseases like plague, said Norman Cantor,
an emeritus professor at New York University and a plague
scholar.
"It would be some improvement over the Middle Ages, but
not all that great an improvement," he said.
Bioterrorism is not new.
Fourteenth-century barbarians tossed plague-infected corpses
over the walls of fortified cities to spread the deadly infection
among their enemies. In 1763, the English at Fort Pitt, Pa.,
gave smallpox-laden blankets to Indians who had been loyal
to the French.
And, as recently as the mid-1990s, U.N.
weapons inspectors discovered that Iraq had stockpiled warheads
containing anthrax spores and the toxin that causes botulism.
Russian scientists have revealed that the former Soviet Union
produced large volumes of weapons-grade anthrax spores. And
Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese religious cult that released sarin
nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, made several
tentative efforts to release biological agents. Members even
went to Zaire to learn more about the deadly ebola virus.
An international biological weapons convention signed by 143
nations has outlawed the development, production and stockpiling
of biological weapons since 1975, but the absence of any formal
verification regime to monitor compliance has limited the
effectiveness of the convention, according to the United Nations.
In any case, terrorists
don't play by the rules. And at least five countries
known to sponsor international terrorism have acquired the
capacity to produce biological weapons, according to U.S.
Army experts.
Despite those capabilities, US preparedness has lagged, in
part because bioterrorism has been deemed so unlikely. "Who
would do such a thing?" skeptics asked. Last week's attacks
in New York and Washington seriously undermined such rational
assurances.
Biological attacks can be far more difficult to respond to
than conventional terrorist attacks. For one thing, they are
covert rather than overt; for days, no
one would know that one had occurred.
That's a huge problem for a disease like
anthrax. Up to 80 percent of people infected by inhaled spores
die within days if untreated. By the time symptoms appear
-- fever, rash and congested lungs -- it's generally too late.
Another problem is that the first-line defenders against a
biological attack would not be police and fire officials,
who are specially trained for public safety emergencies. They
would be local doctors and hospital staffers, most of whom
have received little training in the art and science of being
able to recognize and respond to unusual outbreaks quickly.
And contagious diseases -- unlike explosions -- keep spreading
long after an initial attack. Smallpox, for example, is easily
spread by coughing and sneezing. The disease was declared
eradicated in 1980, but vials of the virus were saved and
the whereabouts of some are uncertain. Vaccination no longer
occurs, leaving an entire generation susceptible to attack.
And few doses of the old vaccine remain in storage.
In a federal exercise three months ago, 24 simulated cases
of smallpox were "discovered" in US hospitals as
part of an assessment of US bioterrorism preparedness. Less
than two weeks after those cases popped up, computer models
indicated that -- if the exercise had been real -- 15,000
people would have contracted the disease and 1,000 would have
died.
The "epidemic" was still raging
when the exercise ended, and, the computer models predicted,
rioting and looting would have broken out as vaccine supplies
ran out.
"This would cripple
the United States if it were to occur," a
former defense department official testified to Congress after
the exercise.
A Clinton administration bioterrorism initiative, administered
jointly by the CDC and the National Institutes of Health,
is speeding development of protective technologies, including
portable DNA diagnostic devices that may someday help identify
mystery microbes raining from the sky. But the initiative's
$300 million budget is a fraction of what will be needed to
protect the nation in years to come, Osterholm and others
said.
Meanwhile, just in case, the CDC has contracted with two biotech
companies to make and stockpile 40 million doses of smallpox
vaccine. The first batches that could be used by civilians
are expected to be ready in 2004.
Washington Post September
17, 2001; Page A24
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