BIGGER WORRIES THAN BIOCHEM

Lost in the hul­la­baloo over David Kay’s report on Iraq’s uncon­ven­tional arms are some pretty basic ques­tions. Like, why all the hys­te­ria about bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal weapons in the first place? And why is America spend­ing bil­lions to defend against on a large-​​scale biochem attack that’ll almost cer­tainly never come?
Maybe the hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing news accounts are true, that Al-​​Qaeda and other ter­ror­ist groups have tried to get their hands on such agents. But with­out the exper­tise and fund­ing of a state spon­sor like Iraq, it’s almost impos­si­ble to pull off the attack of Biblical sig­nif­i­cance that the press has been wail­ing about for so long.
Heck, even with a state spon­sor, it’s extremely dif­fi­cult. Lots and lots of money and exper­tise and needed. Environmental con­di­tions have to be just right; a strong breeze or a light snow will neuter a big chunk of bio­log­i­cal strikes.
So it’s no sur­prise that, since 1900, there have been only 40 recorded bio-​​attacks. Compare that to con­ven­tional ter­ror­ist strikes, the ones using guns and bombs. There have been more than 650 of them world­wide — just since the start of 2002, observes Gary Ackerman, with the Center for Nonprofileration Studies, in a soon-​​to-​​be-​​published arti­cle. What’s more, “there has never been a sin­gle bioter­ror­ist inci­dent with more than 15 fatal­i­ties — an all-​​too-​​common occur­rence when ter­ror­ists use con­ven­tional weapons,” he writes.
Despite this, the Department of Homeland Security’s 2004 bud­get, signed into law last Wednesday, allo­cates nearly $900 mil­lion for “Project BioShield,” an effort to prep vac­cines and treat­ments for bio­log­i­cal and other threats; $88 mil­lion for the “National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center,” to pro­tect peo­ple and crops from germ attacks; $38 mil­lion for air fil­ters to catch pathogens; $84 mil­lion for the pub­lic health sys­tem, to treat bio­log­i­cal and chemical-​​attack vic­tims; the list goes on, just about end­lessly. And it doesn’t even begin to touch the $1.2 bil­lion the Pentagon wants to spend next year on chem-​​bio detec­tion, the $1.6-or-so bil­lion from the National Institutes of Health, or the $600 mil­lion that President Bush wants to spend to keep look­ing for Saddam’s uncon­ven­tional stash.
My Tech Central Station arti­cle has more.
THERE’S MORE: A num­ber of peo­ple wrote in, express­ing upset with this story. But JB — a doc­tor — was the most elo­quent, by far. Here’s what he had to say:

Your analy­sis and con­clu­sions are prob­a­bly cor­rect, with regard to both chem­i­cal weapons and biotox­ins such as bot­u­linum.
But they are utterly and dan­ger­ously incor­rect when applied to bio­log­i­cal agents that can infect humans, repro­duce and amplify them­selves and then spread to other peo­ple. Then it is not a ques­tion of quan­tity or dis­per­sion, but of cre­at­ing an agent with the right incu­ba­tion period, mode of trans­mis­sion and lethal­ity, and then intro­duc­ing it into the tar­get envi­ron­ment in the proper way.
All of which is, unfor­tu­nately, now easy.
You may have heard of the Australian mouse­pox exper­i­ments, the news of which made quite a stir in inter­ested cir­cles a year and a half ago or so. Researchers, in an effort to use mouse­pox virus (a nor­mally mild, non­lethal murine infec­tion) as a vec­tor for a cytokine (IL-​​4) to induce inflam­ma­tion in infected mice and sup­press their repro­duc­tion, found that the inser­tion of the gene for that cytokine turned this lit­tle noth­ing dis­ease into a fatal one, and that pre­vi­ously use­ful mouse­pox vac­cine became fairly inef­fec­tive, to boot.
Note that mouse­pox is related to the virus that causes human small­pox, that you can buy the nec­es­sary mate­ri­als mail order easy as you please, and that the tech­nol­ogy for insert­ing a gene for this or some­thing else into an exist­ing viral genome is triv­ial, and could be done by any grad stu­dent in the sub­ject with access to any rea­son­able uni­ver­sity or indus­trial mol­e­c­u­lar bio/​genetics lab.
This, of course, is just an exam­ple. You could just as well mod­ify Ebola virus to extend its non-​​prostrating con­ta­gious period a lit­tle, so epi­demics would spread instead of burn­ing out, etc. etc.
The dan­ger is acute. We are now in a period of time, which may last 10 years or so (no one knows), in which the abil­ity to cre­ate such genet­i­cally mod­i­fied killers is wide­spread, but the abil­ity to iden­tify, respond to, and neu­tral­ize them quickly enough to avert cat­a­stro­phe, has not yet devel­oped. And every day’s news reminds us that the irra­tional evil that would not for a moment hes­i­tate to use such a weapon con­tin­ues to exist in the world.
By down­play­ing the need to use all avail­able meth­ods and strate­gies (includ­ing, of course, pre-​​emptive mil­i­tary action when nec­es­sary) to pre­vent this threat from killing mil­lions of inno­cents is wrong.

AND MORE: Barbara Rosenberg, with the Federation of American Scientists, calls JB’s warn­ing the “typ­i­cal response of the sci­en­tist who knows noth­ing about BW (bio­log­i­cal weapons).”

He says it is easy. Ha. No ter­ror­ist group would waste time and resources to genet­i­cally engi­neer a new agent and test the result, includ­ing field tests of deliv­ery etc etc. when they can get a big­ger, faster and far more reli­able bang by sim­ple, con­ven­tional means. Extending the incu­ba­tion time of ebola is not some­thing you take off the shelf. Furthermore, the uncon­trol­lable epi­demic sce­nario is vastly exag­ger­ated. Ask pub­lic health offi­cials who have seen small­pox epi­demics.
Incidentally, the mouse­pox exper­i­ment increased lethal­ity, not infec­tiv­ity. Existing agents are already suf­fi­ciently lethal.
He’s right, we need to be able to respond quickly to out­breaks — but no inten­tional out­break will ever rival what nature already does (while few in the devel­oped world pay any attention).

AND MORE: The tone of the piece was that defend­ing against bio­log­i­cal weapons is point­less because they have never killed more than 15 peo­ple per given inci­dent,” writes Defense Tech pal Wyatt Earp.
“But that’s not accu­rate because bioweapons have killed more than 15 peo­ple per inci­dent in the past. Bioterror is just a spin-​​word for an act of war using bio­log­i­cal weapons. And bio­log­i­cal weapons while not chang­ing the out­come of wars, have inflicted mass casu­al­ties on civil­ian pop­u­la­tions dur­ing war­fare and have killed more than 15 peo­ple (dur­ing anthrax leaks) in Russia.
AND MORE: James Lewis, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, for­wards on an arti­cle (unavail­able online, sorry) that basi­cally says the worry over bio-​​terror began when Bill Clinton started read­ing apoc­a­lyp­tic nov­els like the Cobra Event and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.
AND MORE: Defense Tech reader DS reminds us to “keep in mind (that) set­ting pri­or­i­ties is always hard­est at the out­set of war. Over time, have faith that the USA will get its act together.“
AND MORE: RS, a dis­tin­guished Defense Tech reader, says to check out the Adrienne Mayor’s Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare inthe Ancient World. (The Times did a story on Tuesday keyed off of the book.)
Biochem war­fare “all started in — I swear by the Gas Mask of Gilgamesh — Sumeria, circa 1700 BC,” RS notes. That “pro­vides Iraq with con­sid­er­able wig­gle room, as thay can claim that any­thing Dave Kay digs up is just war sur­plus from Tilgath Pileser’s last hit on Uruk.“
AND MORE: “When decid­ing where to allo­cate resources, one must take into account not only the prob­a­bil­ity of the threat, but its poten­tial con­se­quences,” JB fires back at Barbara Rosenberg. “While a con­ven­tional sui­cide bomber or another plane hijack­ing are cer­tainly much more prob­a­ble than the sce­nar­ios we are dis­cussing here, the deaths and civ­i­liza­tional dis­rup­tions they would cause would be triv­ial in com­par­i­son to a suc­cess­ful bio­log­i­cal or nuclear attack.”

October 8th, 2003 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.