ABCNEWS.com: Deadly germs could kill thousands of people in an instant. According to authors William Broad, Judith Miller and Stephen Engelberg, biological warfare is a form of terror the United States has been considering and preparing for for quite some time.Deadly germs sprayed in shopping malls, bombs spewing anthrax spores over battlefields, tiny vials of plague scattered in Times Square - these are the "poor man's hydrogen bombs," hideous weapons of mass destruction that could be made in a simple laboratory.
In 'Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War', Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad of The New York Times write about why bio-warfare and bio-terrorism may fast become our worst national nightmare.
Read an excerpt here:
Chapter Two
Germs and warfare are old allies. More than two millennia ago, Scythian archers dipped arrowheads in manure and rotting corpses to increase the deadliness of their weapons. Tatars in the fourteenth century hurled dead bodies foul with plague over the walls of enemy cities. British soldiers during the French and Indian War gave unfriendly tribes blankets sown with smallpox. The Germans in World War I spread glanders, a disease of horses, among the mounts of rival cavalries. The Japanese in World War II dropped fleas infected with plague on Chinese cities, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands of people.Despite occasional grim successes, germ weapons have never played decisive roles in warfare or terrorism. Unintended infection is another matter. European conquests around the globe were often made possible because the indigenous peoples lacked immunity to the invaders' endemic diseases, including smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, and plague. But intentional warfare with germ weapons has been relatively rare, especially in modern times, and has been widely condemned as unethical and inhumane. Even so, in the early twentieth century, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom were among the many countries that investigated how to wage biological war.
All understood that the weapons they were developing were fundamentally different from bombs and bullets, grenades and missiles. These munitions were alive. They could multiply exponentially and, if highly contagious, spread like wildfire. Strangest of all, given war's din, they worked silently.
In the days before atom bombs, germ weapons were seen as an ideal means of mass destruction, one that left property intact. Their main drawback was their unpredictability. In the close confines of a battlefield, the weapons followed the dictates of nature, not military commanders. They might kill an adversary, or they might bounce back and devastate the ranks of the attacker and his allies. Their best use seemed to be against a distant enemy, reducing the chance that the disease would boomerang.
With intelligence agencies warning that Tokyo and Berlin had biological weapons, Washington began to mobilize against germ attacks in 1942. President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly denounced the exotic arms of America's foes as "terrible and inhumane," even while preparing to retaliate in kind. The man chosen to lead the secret U.S. program was George W. Merck, the president of a drug company. Merck was a household name, and generations of physicians had come to rely on The Merck Manual as a trusted guide for diagnosing and treating disease. But the new effort was designed to be nearly invisible, its degree of secrecy matched only by America's project to build the atom bomb.
This germ initiative had its headquarters at Camp Detrick, an old army base in rural Maryland that was close enough to Washington for quick responsiveness, but far enough away to ensure a margin of isolating safety. The work got under way in 1943 and expanded quickly. From a rural outpost in farm country, the base grew overnight into a dense metropolis of 250 buildings and living quarters for five thousand people.
The post was ringed by fences, towers, and floodlights. Guards, under orders to shoot first and ask questions later, kept their machine guns loaded. The scientists were issued pistols, which they kept at their sides or nearby on workbenches. The headquarters building at the heart of the compound had its own set of armed guards on alert around the clock. All personnel had identity passes with employee photos - a security precaution that would become widespread in future decades. Persons leaving the post surrendered their photo passes to the guards; accidentally keeping one could lead to arrest and interrogation.
The scientists toiled on anthrax for killing enemy troops and agricultural blights for destroying Japanese rice and German potatoes. It wasn't easy work. For instance, they had to coax the anthrax bug into its best form. Toward the end of its growth cycle, they used heat or chemical shock to force the rod-shaped bacteria to convert into spores, a dormant state. When the process worked properly, the spores were very hardy, resisting heat, disinfectants, sunlight, and other environmental factors. Anthrax spores had been known to remain viable for decades. The scientists harvested the spores and put them into weapons. Upon being inhaled, the spores would convert back to rods and establish an infection.
The Detrick scientists also learned how to reap the poisons that some bacteria excrete - a tactic that sidestepped the necessity of infection and instead yielded deadly toxins that could be sprayed directly on foes. One was botulinum toxin, the most poisonous compound known to science. It paralyzes muscles, including the diaphragm, without which the lungs cannot function, and its victims quickly die. In time, the scientists learned how to make botulinum toxin so concentrated that a pound of it, if properly dispersed, could in theory kill a billion people.
None of the biological arms developed by the United States were used on the battlefield during the war, and afterward the effort slowed down markedly and shrank in size. But it endured. One reason was that the Americans obtained thousands of records from Japan documenting the Imperial Army's germ-warfare program during World War II. Japan had killed thousands of Chinese in widespread attacks with anthrax, typhoid, and plague on Manchurian towns and cities, Western scholars say. Doctors in the army's infamous Unit 731 had also conducted gruesome experiments on Chinese and other prisoners of war, including Americans. Doctors had infected healthy prisoners with pathogens to learn how diseases spread. Many victims, or "logs" as the Japanese called them, were deliberately starved and frozen to death. Some were dissected alive. While nine Japanese doctors and nurses were convicted after the war of having vivisected eight captured American fliers, no senior Japanese official was tried for having waged biological warfare. And American officials granted Unit 731's chief, Shiro Ishii, and several of his associates immunity from prosecution in exchange for the voluminous records of Japan's germ program and their help in deciphering them. The scientific data were considered a windfall and carefully studied.
The American military was fascinated by a weapon of mass destruction whose costs were so low compared with those for chemical arms and the atom bomb, recently invented. The federal government worried that not only the Soviets but other adversaries making similar comparisons would be tempted to develop pathogens for warfare. Pound for pound, germ weapons were seen as potentially rivaling nuclear blasts in their power to maim and kill, and some were considered even more destructive.
In a secret report of July 1949, a panel of more than a dozen senior federal and private experts told the secretary of defense that germ weapons deserved more attention in planning and development. Such warfare was "in its infancy," the panel said, and foreseeable advances would raise weapon effectiveness "by a very large factor." Germ weapons, silent but deadly, were ideal for covert attacks. "The resemblance of the results of such sabotage to natural occurrences," the panel said, would greatly aid clandestine use. It warned that germ attacks on the United States "might be disastrous" and urgently recommended crash programs of "home defense, involving collaborate efforts of federal, state and private agencies."
Some veterans of the secretive work disagreed with the government's reasoning. Theodor Rosebury, a microbiologist at Detrick during the war, assailed germ weapons in his 1949 book Peace or Pestilence. He warned that the field's promises were illusory and that its munitions had no real military value, since the outcome of germ attacks would always be impossible to predict or control. The expertise, he argued, should instead be turned to attacking infectious disease. His plea had no immediate impact.
In April 1951, Patrick arrived at the Detrick army base on the outskirts of Frederick, Maryland. He was twenty-five.
Barbed wire ran atop its fences. CAMERAS ARE UNAUTHORIZED read the sign at the front gate.
Guards, armed and alert, stood at the entrance.
Like all new employees, Patrick signed a waiver that granted the United States government rights to his body if he died from an illness acquired at Detrick. Having done that, he received a series of vaccinations, which were required before new employees could go into "hot zones" teeming with disease germs.
He quickly learned the other survival rituals - the eating of antibiotics, the washing of hands, the bathing of people and labs in ultra-violet light, the wavelength best suited for killing germs. Caution also called for protective hoods and masks, rubber gloves and boots. The men often donned protective suits that made them sweat and itch. They breathed purified air. They stood for hours at "hot boxes" - glass housings with attached rubber gloves so the men could reach inside to handle glassware swarming with microbes or to assemble the guts of biological bombs. Despite the dangers, Patrick moved his family onto the post in 1952. It had its own housing, theater, restaurants, and child care. The social life revolved around the officers' club.
Patrick joined Detrick just as it was beginning to stir. The outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War led Washington to put new emphasis on planning for germ battles. The testing of prototype nuclear arms at sites in the Soviet Union and the United States was already shaking the globe.
At Detrick, construction crews built a hollow metal sphere four stories high. Employees called it the eight ball. Inside, germ weapons were to be exploded, creating mists of infectious aerosols for testing on animals and people. Workers also erected Building 470, a windowless prototype factory for making anthrax. It rose eight stories, a skyscraper among the low buildings.
Under military orders, often clandestinely, Detrick experts fanned out to probe the nation's vulnerability to saboteurs. The scientists sprayed mild germs on San Francisco and shattered lightbulbs filled with bacteria in the New York City subway, all to assess the ability of pathogens to spread through urban centers. The germs were meant to be harmless. But years later critics charged that some had produced hidden epidemics, especially among the old and infirm. After the army sprayed the San Francisco area with Serratia marcescens, eleven patients at the Stanford University hospital came down with that type of infection. One patient died there. The doctors were so mystified by the outbreak that they wrote it up in a medical journal. The government later denied any responsibility for the death or the other infections, producing evidence in court that its germs were not to blame. The scientific dispute was never resolved.
The army also studied the threat of enemies wielding a speculative class of munitions known as ethnic weapons - germs that selectively target particular races. One military worry centered on Coccidioides immitis, a fungus that causes fever, cough, and chills and, if left untreated, kills blacks far more often than whites. The military feared that it would be used against bases, where blacks tended to do the manual labor. In 1951, at navy supply depots in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and Norfolk, Virginia, the Detrick scientists staged mock attacks with a nonlethal variant of the deadly fungus. The depots, said a report on the action, employed "many Negroes, whose incapacitation would seriously affect the operation of the supply system."
American scientists also did outdoor experiments to assess how Soviet cities could be attacked with anthrax germs. Dry runs were made against Saint Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg, cities whose climates and sizes were judged similar to the Soviet targets. The effort was code-named Project Saint Jo. The clandestine tests, involving 173 releases of noninfectious aerosols, were meant to determine how much agent would have to rain down on Kiev, Leningrad, and Moscow to kill its residents. Each cluster bomb in the planned attacks held 536 bomblets. Upon hitting the ground, each bomblet would emit a little more than an ounce of anthrax mist. The disease, if untreated, kills nearly every infected person - a very high rate of mortality, even compared with plague and most other pathogens.
The snow was deep and the sky clear when experimenters in a special car drove into a Minneapolis suburb of homes, light industry, trees, and pine foliage to release the test mist. There was very little wind, and the winter night was marked by a strong temperature inversion. Overhead, a dome of warm air trapped cool air below. Air samplers showed that the release traveled nearly a mile. The "dosage area," experimenters wrote, was "unusually large."
Until Patrick's arrival, America's hunt for living weapons had focused mainly on bacterial diseases, including anthrax, plague, and tularemia, a disease which kills one out of twenty people and leaves the rest very sick. Tularemia produced not only the usual chills, fever, and coughing of infectious disease but also skin lesions larger than those of smallpox - ulcers up to an inch wide, their centers raw, their edges turned up in reddish mounds.
But the shortcomings of bacteria as weapons were becoming obvious. Infections acquired in attacks on cities or battlefields could be successfully treated by large doses of antibiotics - the wonder drugs that Patrick as an industry researcher had been pioneering. That emerging fact of medical life diminished the role of bacteria as killers and cripplers for war.
Viruses were a beguiling alternative. Compared with bacteria, they were less complex and often more deadly. To Detrick scientists, their microscopic size offered a range of potential military advantages.
A single human egg is just visible to the naked eye and has a width of about one hundred microns, or millionths of a meter. Human hairs are seventy-five to one hundred microns wide and easier to see because they are long. An ordinary human cell is about ten microns wide and by definition invisible. Most bacteria are one or two microns wide. They and their cousins, such as the mycobacteria, are considered the smallest of the microscopic world's fully living things.
By contrast, viruses are hundreds of times smaller, and occasionally a thousand times. If bacteria were the size of cars and minivans, viruses would be the size of cell phones. One of the tinier ones, the yellow fever virus, is only two one-hundredths of a micron wide. The foot-and-mouth virus is smaller. Viruses are small because they lack most of life's usual parts and processes, such as metabolism and respiration. Scientists consider them barely alive, seeing them more as robots than organisms. To thrive and reproduce, they invade a cell and take over its biochemical gear, often at the expense of the host.
Over the ages, this biological intimacy has made viruses one of the most dangerous of all humanity's foes. They include the causative agents of influenza, smallpox, and Ebola, the scourge from Africa that bleeds its victims dry.
People can be powerless against them. Viruses are small enough to slip into cells, where they are safe from the assaults of the human immune system. By contrast, anthrax bacteria, lumbering giants at up to four microns wide, must battle their way into the body, with many thousands of them often needed to start an infestation.
Moreover, viruses are largely invulnerable to attack by antibiotics or other weapons of science because they are nearly indistinguishable from their human hosts. As an army reference book on germ warfare put it, viruses "may be particularly attractive" because so few treatments are available against them.
As Detrick scientists investigated such issues, they did know of one treatment that worked against viruses - immunization. Most vaccines are made of viruses that are dead, weakened, or harmless yet biologically akin to noxious ones. When injected - or, in some cases, swallowed - the vaccine sends a false alarm of pending attack to the body's immune system, which then forms antibodies to fight a particular type of invader. The defensive buildup is slow. So, to ward off invaders effectively, vaccines must often be given weeks to months in advance. They seldom work right away.
From the start, the army knew that the protective action of vaccines could be turned on its head to make viruses more suitable for war. An aggressor could use immunization to protect his troops, while an unvaccinated enemy would be vulnerable.
As Patrick settled into Detrick, the genocidal power of viruses was driven home by two dramatic episodes of pest control. The target was rabbits. The creatures had overrun Australia, their numbers competing so vigorously for sheep and cattle pasture that livestock production began to fall. In 1950, scientists responded with the virus that causes myxomatosis, a disease that often kills rabbits after leaving them blind and twitching. It spread fast and killed more than 99 percent of the infected animals. Europe in the postwar period had suffered a similar explosion of rabbits, which ate farmers'crops. In 1952, French experts released a few animals infected with the virus at Eure-et-Loire, not far from the palace at Versailles. By the next year, the disease had swept not only through France but as far as Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany, killing up to 90 percent of the rabbits. Farmers were elated. In time, the exterminations were seen as vital to the postwar revival of European agriculture.
The rabbit killing was of special interest to the American germ warriors because the myxomatosis virus is part of the pox family, whose most famous member causes smallpox. So the rabbit drama was considered useful in studying how the smallpox virus might spread through populations of unvaccinated humans.
From 'Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War', copyright © 2001 by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad.
Christian Science Monitor,
Wednesday, September 26, 2001The next destroyer of worlds
By Michael O'Hanlon
- An investigation of biological weapons in the US and abroadSep 27, 2001 (The Christian Science Monitor via COMTEX) - New York Times reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad have written an excellent book on the broad issue of biological weapons. They combine crisp writing, engaging anecdotes, pathbreaking reporting, and thoughtful policy analysis into this volume - certainly one of the best overviews of the subject.
The book opens with a chilling report on a bioterrorism attack carried out by members of a religious cult in Oregon in 1984. Although no one died, almost a thousand people became sick. The frantic efforts of doctors and law enforcement officials to determine the nature of the attack - or even to determine if it was an attack - provide a warning in miniature of the daunting challenges that face the US.
The book's early chapters focus on the history of biological-weapons research during the cold war, revealing considerable detail about an ambitious American program through the 1960s as well as the better-known Soviet efforts. Even as the US developed a massive nuclear stockpile that should have sufficed as an ultimate deterrent, cold-war dynamics drove the pursuit of various types of germ warfare - including an elusive quest for agents that could incapacitate large segments of the population of a country such as Cuba or Vietnam without killing them. Richard Nixon ended such efforts in 1969.
The book also details Saddam Hussein's largely successful efforts to acquire biological weaponry. It explains the great worries his programs caused American policymakers during the Gulf War, when they knew that the US lacked the necessary stockpiles of vaccines and the types of biological agent detectors that would have been essential to protect American troops.
The book bogs down a bit in its middle sections, when it provides more detail than necessary on the 1990s US debates over vaccinating soldiers against anthrax and funding various types of biological-preparedness programs. But this is a minor flaw in the narrative. The story picks up again as the authors describe how President Clinton became interested in the subject of biological arms.
The final chapters of the book unveil the results of the journalists' best investigative reporting, detailed in a New York Times story earlier this month as well. In these pages, the authors explain how the US government elected to build mock biological weapons in the 1990s without substantial White House oversight or a fully convincing case that its research was consistent with the 1972 treaty banning the development and stockpiling of biological arms for military purposes. This is good reporting, even if it falls somewhat short of providing the smoking gun of a treaty violation.
The book's policy prescriptions are a bit shallow. The authors' call for some type of verification protocol for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, even while admitting that "the world's experience with Iraq clearly shows the limits of international inspections."
More attention to the tangential role of nuclear arms would have been helpful, too. Some maintain that the US will never be able to abolish its nuclear arms, given the need to deter the use of biological agents.
How serious a threat is posed by biological arms in the hands of terrorists? The authors' primary means of addressing this question is by considering the history of the Japanesecult Aum Shinrikyo. Other groups such as Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, receive very limited attention. Nevertheless, looking over their research, the authors conclude, "The world's response to the growing dangers of germ weapons has fallen far short of what is needed."
The authors are right to call for more research on antidotes to biological agents and improvements in public health systems and epidemiological tracking, but they raise a troubling domestic impediment to such preparedness. "Biodefense," they warn, "has no natural political constituency in Washington. The military-industrial complex that supports weapons systems has little interest in vaccines and public health."
This thorough, engaging, and important book concludes, "If we as a nation believe that the germ threat is a hoax, we are spending too much money on it. But if the danger is real, as we conclude that it is, then the investment is much too haphazard and diffuse."
Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
April 5, 1999Defector Tells Of Soviet And Chinese Germ Weapons
By William J. Broad, and Judith MillerThe most senior defector from the Soviet germ-warfare program says in a new book that Soviet officials concluded that China had suffered a serious accident at one of its secret plants for developing biological weapons, causing two major epidemics.
The book also reports that Soviet researchers tried to turn HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, into a weapon and that even as the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, pursued peace openings with the West, he ordered a vast expansion of the deadly effort to turn germs and viruses into weapons of mass destruction.
The defector, Kanatjan Alibekov, now known as Ken Alibek, says in the book that as deputy director of a top branch of the Soviet program, he knew of the disaster in China because he saw secret Soviet intelligence reports twice a month.
Spy satellites peering down at China found what seemed to be a large biological-weapons laboratory and plant near a remote site for testing nuclear warheads, he wrote. Intelligence agents then found evidence that two epidemics of hemorrhagic fever swept the region in the late 1980s. The area had never previously known such diseases, which cause profuse bleeding and death.
"Our analysts," Alibek said, "concluded that they were caused by an accident in a lab where Chinese scientists were weaponizing viral diseases." Viral scourges that cause intense bleeding include Marburg fever and the dreaded Ebola virus. Both are endemic to Africa.
China has signed a 1972 treaty banning biological weapons. During World War II it became one of the few modern countries to experience their horrors when Japanese attackers sowed epidemics there, killing thousands of Chinese.
U.S. intelligence agencies have long suspected that China harbors a biological-weapons program. Early in 1993, shortly after Alibek fled to the United States, the outgoing Bush administration accused Beijing of having an active germ-warfare effort, which it has denied. The United States unilaterally ended its own germ-weapons program in 1969.
Last week, the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not return several telephone calls seeking comment, and an American expert who tracks germ intelligence said he did not know of any such epidemics in China.
The allegation is one of several in Alibek's new book, 'Biohazard', which was written with a journalist, Stephen Handelman, and is being published by Random House this week. It was made available to The New York Times in advance.
U.S. intelligence officials who know what Alibek said in secret debriefings after his defection in 1992 give his new account considerable credence. They have called him highly believable about the subjects he knows firsthand, like the Soviet biological-weapons program from 1975 to 1992, when he served as one of Moscow's top germ warriors. He is less reliable, they say, on political and military issues that he knows secondhand.
The book asserts that Gorbachev, in his "characteristic scrawl," signed a five-year plan for 1985 to 1990 that ordered the most ambitious effort ever for the development of deadly germs and viruses, including smallpox, as weapons. In 1980, world health authorities declared the ancient scourge eradicated from all human populations.
"Gorbachev's Five-Year Plan -- and his generous funding, which would amount to over $1 billion by the end of the decade -- allowed us to catch up" with the American biological weapons program, which was making great strides, Alibek writes.
In 1988, as Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reform campaigns were in full swing and the Russians and Americans were negotiating new arms-control treaties, officials "at the highest levels," Alibek said, ordered the arming of giant SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago with anthrax and other deadly germs.
The secret move came as Soviet leaders publicly waged a peace offensive. In his book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (Harper & Row, 1987), Gorbachev argued that for decades Western experts had falsely accused Moscow of weapon horrors and that the real engine of the arms race was the United States.
Contacted through his office in Moscow, Gorbachev sidestepped Alibek's charges and questions about the germ program. His spokesman said that Gorbachev did not know Alibek, and that there was "no sense in getting involved in an endless process of commenting."
William C. Patrick III, a key figure in the United States' former germ-warfare program who helped debrief Alibek after his defection in 1992, said many of the book's assertions were consistent with what Alibek had told U.S. officials in secret sessions at the time. He called the information Alibek had provided "critical" to Washington's understanding of the Soviet program.
"He laid it all out for the first time," Patrick said.
Among the book's new disclosures are:
In his book, Alibek, a Kazakh by birth, says the Soviet state devoted a considerable part of its treasury to readying deadly germs for war. At its peak in the late 1980s, he writes, the program had 60,000 employees working at scores of sites throughout the Soviet Union.
- Moscow mastered the art of rearranging genes to make harmful microbes even more potent and harder to counteract. Anthrax, a top biological warfare agent that causes high fever and death, was genetically altered, he says, to resist five kinds of antibiotics.
- The top-secret program obtained a sample of HIV, the AIDS virus, from the United States in 1985 and tried unsuccessfully to turn the slow killer into a weapon.
- A senior military official told him that the Soviet Union had waged germ warfare in Afghanistan from planes, spraying armed rebels with glanders in an unsuccessful bid to subdue them. Glanders is a chronic bacterial disease of horses that can be highly lethal in humans.
- Under a top-secret project known as Bonfire, Soviet scientists in 1989 discovered "a new class of weapons" -- now called bioregulators -- that could "damage the nervous system, alter moods, trigger psychological changes and even kill." The KGB secret police agency was particularly interested in them because they "could not be traced by pathologists." A Soviet program called Flute worked on germs and other agents that could be used mainly for political assassinations.
- While directing about half of the Soviet biological- warfare work force, he says, he discovered that an abandoned factory in Kazakhstan where he and his childhood friends had played after school had once made noxious germs meant to kill enemy crops and livestock.
"The Americans had just two specialists in anthrax," he wrote of his observations during his first tour of U.S. sites as part of a Soviet-American inspection agreement in 1991. "We had two thousand."
About a dozen of the 40 institutes that were part of Biopreparat, the civilian cover group that Alibek helped run, were used "exclusively" for offensive agents and weapons for the military, he wrote.
After he fled Russia and took up residence in the United States, Alibek says, he was approached by intermediaries of emissaries of several countries that courted him for his deadly expertise, including South Korea, France and Israel. The work for which he was to be hired was defensive, the intermediaries said.
At least 25 people who used to work in the Soviet germ-warfare program now work in the United States in nonweapons work, he writes. It is impossible to know how many have been recruited overseas. But there is no doubt, he adds, "that their expertise has been attracting bidders," including countries unfriendly to the United States.
The germ warriors staying behind apparently can be dangerous as well. He said he had recently received a disconcerting flier from a Moscow-based company, Bioeffekt Ltd. "It offered, by mail order, three genetically engineered strains of tularemia," Alibek said.
The disease, spread by a highly infectious germ, causes chills, fever, muscle aches, fatigue and pneumonialike symptoms, and can be fatal. The altered bacteria, he said, reportedly have new genes that increase the disease's virulence. The flier, Alibek said, boasted that the germs were produced by "technology unknown outside Russia."
Alibek has said he decided to speak out publicly to fight the spread of biological weapons and to seek absolution for having made them.
He described himself as once a "staunch patriot" who believed until his tour of U.S. biological sites while still a Soviet official that the United States had not unilaterally renounced offensive germ-weapons programs in 1969 as President Nixon had asserted. He said he had decided to write about the weapons program that was for decades one of Moscow's deepest secrets.
TORONTO STAR,
July 31st, 2001U.S. must act on biological weapons issue
by Stephen HandelmanNEW YORK - During the 1980s, packages containing material for some of the world's deadliest weapons travelled periodically from a laboratory in Maryland to Iraq.
They contained strains of anthrax, tularemia and Venezuelan equine encephalitis that could be fashioned into biological armaments by scientists who had the right technological knowledge. The shipments were perfectly legal: They came from the American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Md., a huge biotech "bank" that makes micro-organisms available to researchers around the world.
Iraqi scientists simply ordered them from a catalogue. They paid $35 (U.S.) for each shipment. Were those strains actually turned into weapons? No one knows, although Iraq is one of at least 17 countries identified by U.S. authorities as possessing biological weaponry.
The "catalogue shopping" continues today. Although a 1996 U.S. law requires germ banks and biotech firms to check the identities of prospective buyers, authorities know it is difficult to distinguish between peaceful and threatening biotechnology research.
And there are more than 1,500 such microbe banks around the world.
This is the stark reality that makes many people look skeptically at any global effort to prevent the development of biological weapons. It's also a reality that appears to have persuaded the Bush administration to abandon a three-year effort to strengthen the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
"You can't apply traditional arms control thinking to biotechnology," one U.S. official explained to The New York Times. "You need out-of-the-box solutions to stop the spread of this kind of weapon because it is unlike any other."
Washington, which had led the effort in the first place following an agreement negotiated with Russia's Boris Yeltsin in 1998, says it's looking for better "alternatives." International outrage wasn't slow to follow. Critics lumped this latest Bush foreign policy move with recent decisions to oppose the Kyoto climate protocol and the U.N. small arms convention, and to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
The hostility of Washington's new foreign policy mandarins to international treaties - particularly arms control treaties - is certainly worrying. It unhinges a certain global sense of predictability in which treaties, even bad ones, play an important part.
Still, the Bush government is right to re-think the biological weapons accord.
The 1972 treaty was written to "exclude completely the possibility of bacteriological agents and toxins being used as weapons." By most definitions, it was a failure. In 1973, the Soviet Union (which signed the treaty along with 142 other nations) launched a crash program in genetic engineering to modernize its existing arsenal of biological weapons. Dozens of diseases, ranging from smallpox to plague, were earmarked for research in a secret program that paralleled the massive Soviet nuclear complex. The program was updated by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
The U.S., which had formally renounced biological weapons research before signing the treaty, did not realize the extent of the Soviet program until the defection of one of the program's top scientists, Yuri Pasechnik, in 1989.
Even as Moscow devoted huge amounts of energy and ingenuity to concealing its program, the science of building such weapons advanced by leaps and bounds. Today, any nation with a basic core of researchers and labs can develop a cheap and "modest" bioweaponry program to manufacture agents capable of killing thousands of people by stealth.
The now-abandoned amendment "protocol" to the 1972 treaty would have created an international inspection organization authorized to monitor facilities capable of making or storing biological weapons. But that, today, would include hundreds of pharmaceutical labs and research centres that are researching everything from new vaccines to defences against germ warfare. Pharmaceutical companies, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, don't want to open their doors to inspectors - claiming their commercial secrets would become transparent to competitors.
Moreover, the amendment's proposals for punishing suspected bioweapons makers are weak and virtually unenforceable.
It's true that no biological weapons treaty can fully do the job that's advertised for it. But it's far from a lost cause. There are new techniques that allow drug companies to protect their secrets while opening their labs to inspection. Mandatory international co-operation on biodefence research can make it harder for countries to hide nefarious schemes - and isolate "rogue" weapons makers.
The Bush administration hasn't spelled out its "alternatives" and some skeptics believe its pathological opposition to arms treaties makes such alternatives unlikely. If that's true, it would be bad news. Without U.S. support behind a global commitment to non-proliferation of bioweapons, the world will be a more dangerous place.
Pointing out the limitations of current thinking about biological weapons is one thing. But it's now up to Washington to prove the skeptics wrong - and fast.
THE TIMES, London,
September 5th, 2001Secret US germ tests threat to treaty
From Roland Watson in WashingtonTHE Pentagon has secretly built a germ factory capable of producing enough deadly bacteria to kill millions of people, it was revealed yesterday.
The project is one of a number of covert biological initiatives pursued by the United States over recent years. One proposal awaiting final approval is to manufacture a more potent version of anthrax using genetically engineered biological agents. Last night, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, confirmed that the Administration planned to proceed with these tests.
The disclosure suggests that the US has been severely testing the spirit, and possibly the letter, of the 1972 convention on biological weapons. The treaty forbids nations from developing or acquiring weapons that spread disease, but allows work on vaccines and other protective measures.
The White House insisted yesterday that all research conducted by military and CIA scientists in the field of biological warfare was "purely defensive". The projects, which were started under the Clinton Administration and are set to be expanded under President Bush, are designed to allow the US to defend itself in the face of germ warfare, according to government officials.
Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush's spokesman, said: "The United States has operated for a period of time a programme that was designed to protect our servicemen and women particularly from the hazards of chemical and biological warfare." However, the disclosure, in The New York Times yesterday, is likely to deepen the diplomatic rifts between Mr Bush and other Western governments already smarting from what they regard as his high-handed approach to international protocols. Mr Bush has angered significant sections of international opinion by threatening to dismantle the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in favour of his vision of a missile defence shield. He has also refused to sign the Kyoto treaty on climate change.
Yesterday's disclosure was seen as one reason why Mr Bush had also refused to sign up to a draft agreement strengthening the 29-year-old convention on biological weapons, even though it had been ratified by 140 other countries. By signing, the US would have had to reveal if, and where, it was conducting defensive germ research.
The first in a series of projects was begun in 1997, according to The New York Times, whose report was timed to coincide with the imminent publication of a book entitled Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. The impetus for the research was to mimic the steps that a state or terrorist would take to amass a biological arsenal, allowing the US military to better understand the threat, according to Administration officials who spoke to the authors. It led the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, to build its own germ factory in the middle of the Nevada desert.
At Camp 12 of the Nellis Air Force Range, scientists constructed a 50-litre cylinder capable of cultivating germs out of materials bought commercially from hardware stores. The aim was to assess how easy it was for a rogue state or terrorist group to construct one of its own without being detected. In a separate CIA programme, codenamed Clear Vision, agents built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed bomb that they feared could make its way on to the black market.
In a third programme the Pentagon has drawn up plans to engineer genetically a more potent version of the bacterium that causes anthrax. The project would be designed to assess whether the anthrax vaccine given to US servicemen and women was effective against such a superbug. The projects led to rows among officials about whether they violated the 1972 treaty. Legal advice taken by the CIA suggested the research was within its bounds, but others disagreed.
An official from the Clinton White House complained that they had not been kept fully informed of developments. However, after they became aware of the extent of the projects, the White House took its own legal advice and concluded that the treaty was not being violated.
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD,
22nd September, 2001Plague from the air deadlier than the suicidal inferno
By Rick Weiss and agenciesIt would require just a small private plane, not a hijacked commercial jetliner.
A helper could dump a bag of powdery bacterial spores, rather than having to overpower passengers. And the plane could then be landed instead of crashing in a suicidal inferno.
It's called bioterrorism, and experts say it would be a lot easier to conduct and is more likely to happen in the next few years than a replay of last week's attacks.
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.
Victims could pass on the microbes to thousands of others before doctors even worked out what was going on.
Bioterrorism could also foment political instability, given the panic that 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 Centre 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."
Although speculation has ranged over about 20 possible agents of a bioterrorism attack, five are considered possible.
In many respects the United States is less prepared for bioterrorism than for conventional terrorism.
- Smallpox spreads rapidly and is virtually untreatable once symptoms appear. The mortality rate is about 30 per cent.
- Plague can be treated with antibiotics if an epidemic is recognised quickly. Untreated, it is nearly 100 per cent fatal.
- Anthrax does not spread from human to human, but the spores can be easily stored for up to a century. Scattered over a large city, about 50 kilograms of spores could cause 250,000 cases and 100,000 deaths. Iraq is known to have mass-produced anthrax spores before the Gulf War.
- Tularemia is contracted easily on exposure. Spread in an aerosol cloud, a 50-kilogram attack would kill an estimated 19,000.
- Botulinum toxin is the single most poisonous substance known. It is produced by a bacteria that could be spread through the air or in contaminated food. Most water treatment techniques neutralise the toxin. The Aum Shinrikyo cult has been accused of trying to use botulinum.
An October 1999 General Accounting Office (GAO) report documented major gaps in the nation's system for protection against biological attacks.
Inspectors found shortages of vaccines and medicines, stock rooms filled with expired drugs, and lax security where crucial drugs were stored.
A January report by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta concluded that the nation's public health infrastructure was "not adequate to detect and respond to a bioterrorist event".
The US and the world are largely unprepared to fight major outbreaks of deadly diseases such as 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.
© The Washington Post
TORONTO STAR
24th September, 2001Did terrorists plot bio attacks?
Group of Middle Eastern men asked persistent 'odd questions' about crop duster planesBELLE GLADE, Fla. (AP) - A group of Middle Eastern men repeatedly asked a fertilizer company about crop-duster planes in the weeks leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, company employees have told FBI investigators.
J. D. (Will) Lee, general manager of South Florida Crop Care, said Monday that groups of two or three Middle Eastern men came by almost every weekend for six or eight weeks before the attacks, including the weekend just before the Sept. 11 assaults.
While the FBI investigated, the Federal Aviation Administration banned crop-dusting planes from flying in U.S. airspace Sunday, then extended that ban another day on Monday. Officials said they were concerned about the possibility of chemical and biological attacks.
Lee said the men were very persistent, asking ''odd questions'' about his yellow and blue 502 Air Tractor crop-duster.
''I wouldn't spend any time talking to them or telling them anything because I didn't think it was any of their business,'' Lee said.
Often arriving in rented vans at the Belle Glade Municipal Airport, where the crop dusting business is located, the men asked about the range of the airplane, how much it would haul, how difficult it was to fly and how much fuel it would carry, Lee said.
Lee said a co-worker, James Lester, identified one of the men for the FBI as Mohamed Atta, believed to be one of the hijackers in the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Lester did not return a phone message seeking comment.
Belle Glade is about 65 kilometres west of West Palm Beach and about an hour's drive from where some of the suspected hijackers stayed before the attacks.
The ban on crop dusters was the second time that agricultural pilots were told not to fly since the attacks.
Asked about the new grounding, the FBI said it was one of the steps it has taken out of ''an abundance of caution'' and ''in reaction to every bit of information and threats received during the course of this investigation.''
James Callan, executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association, said he got a call from an FAA official about 8 a.m. Sunday.
''They said it was a national security issue,'' Callan said. ''I made some calls and the indication was that there still is no specific threat, but the FBI apparently ordered this and they just want to make sure that everyone in the ag (agriculture) aviation industry is keeping their eyes and ears open.''
The Washington Post also reported that government investigators found a crop-duster manual among the possessions of Zacarias Moussaoui, who is in federal custody on immigration violations. He was detained after he sought flight training in Minnesota and the school grew suspicious and called authorities.
U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined the potential threat Sunday on CBS' Face The Nation, saying that countries sponsoring terrorism have ''very active chemical and biological warfare programs.''
''We know that they are in close contact with terrorist networks around the world,'' he said.
InsightMagazine.comThe Danger of Biological War
By James P. Lucier
jlucier@InsightMag.comRussia has enough anthrax to kill the world's population four times over. Iraq stockpiles weaponized neurotoxins. Can homeland defense hold up against these weapons?
It was a low-tech attack with box-cutters and plastic knives. But suppose it had been a low-tech attack with even more murdered across a broader territory? In the weeks before the airline disasters, Washington officials were thinking a lot about that. But they were not thinking nuclear - they've been thinking biological.
Since Sept. 11, they've been thinking about it even more intensely. Among the workers immediately sorting through the rubble were biohazard specialists, alerted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quietly taking samples to see if biological agents had been secreted in the baggage of the terrorists.
More disturbing still was a report by Bill Gertz of the Washington Times that Mohammed Atta, one of the dead terrorists, had been seen a year ago in talks with a high-level Iraqi intelligence official. Specialists long have known that Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons, although U.N. inspectors in postwar Iraq, buffaloed by Saddam Hussein's game of three-card monte, did not find any. Intelligence sources tell Insight that Saddam simply hired scientists from the Russian biological-weapons complex called Biopreparat.
Ken Alibek was deputy chief of Biopreparat when he defected in 1992. The program had the highest security classification, and the Russians routinely denied that it existed. Alibek was told that it was necessary because the United States was preparing such weapons. Then he was sent on an official arms-control inspection team to examine U.S. biological facilities. Russian intelligence experts had primed him to look for hidden facilities for making biological weapons, but what he found instead was rusted machinery that had been decommissioned for years.
Alibek was disillusioned when he realized that the rationale for the Soviet/Russian programs was a lie. He personally had seen the signature of Mikhail Gorbachev on orders to develop various biological weapons.
Alibek revealed that Russia had produced 80 tons of weaponized smallpox - a virus everyone believed had been eliminated from Earth. He reported that the Russians had several bacterial weapons ready for use: brucellosis, tularemia, anthrax, glanders and plague. Rickettsial weapons included epidemic typus and Q fever. Viral weapons besides smallpox included encephalitis and Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola. When Alibek left, Biopreparat was working to weaponize Ebola, too, as well as Japanese encephalitis.
In February the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, with William Schneider Jr. as chairman, warned that "the remaining superpower, the United States, has become a target for both countries and transnational actors. Potential adversaries are more likely to use asymmetric warfare in the future. The threat of an asymmetric attack poses danger not only in the physical effects of such an attack but in the psychological fear and damage it could beget as well." Was anyone listening?
The board warns that Iraq has stockpiled 19,000 pounds of botulinum toxin, with more than one-half of it weaponized. And it reports the Russian program has enough anthrax stockpiled to kill the world's population four times over. It states that four people can produce anthrax simulant in three weeks with an investment of $250,000. Moreover, it finds that the U.S. civilian health-care and pharmaceutical system operates at 95 percent capacity - meaning that it has virtually no ability to absorb a mass-casualty event.
"The BW [biological warfare] task force found that this nation does not have an effective, early capability to assess the BW threat and, as a consequence, cannot prevent such a crisis," the board says. "The infrastructure does not exist to execute the desired consequence-management measures."
Finally, the board adds: "An attack on a city with 100 kilograms of bioagent would kill 1 to 3 million people, twice the number of fatalities that would result from a one-megaton nuclear weapon."
Of all the biological threats, smallpox perhaps has the greatest potential as a terror weapon because it is highly contagious. One victim passes it to another and, as panic sets in, persons who don't realize they are infected flee immediate danger only to spread it to others. Smallpox was a scourge of mankind from the beginning of time until vaccination was discovered around 1800, and its use became a standard of health throughout the world. The World Health Organization has declared that the last person to die of smallpox passed in 1977, with the result that vaccination for this disease was discontinued. This means millions of persons now are extremely vulnerable if smallpox is released into the environment.
A senior-level war game code-named "Dark Winter" was conducted June 22-23 to simulate a smallpox terror attack on Oklahoma City. Participants included Oklahoma Republican Gov. Frank Keating and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.). Witnesses observed the breakdown of the public-health response, the lack of an adequate supply of smallpox vaccine, the roles of the state and federal governments, and potential military responses. As the game played out, the disease simulation was spread to 25 states and 15 countries.
Even so, it long was thought that the difficulties of manufacturing weaponized smallpox were so great that terrorist groups would not be able to produce it. In March 1999 the CIA told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in an unclassified report that "the preparation and effective use of BW by both potentially hostile states and by nonstate actions, including terrorists, is harder than some popular literature seems to suggest."
A 1999 report of the General Accounting Office (GAO) on the threat of chemical and biological terrorism thought it improbable. "In most cases terrorists would have to overcome significant technical and operational challenges to successfully make and release chemical or biological agents of sufficient quality and quantity to kill or injure large numbers of people without substantial assistance from a state sponsor," Harry Hinton Jr., assistant comptroller of the GAO, told Congress.
David Franz, a former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., and now a vice president of the Southern Research Institute, tells Insight: "The reason the GAO report says this is that with the classical agents we worry about, you have to grow them, purify them, spray them in a liquid form [which isn't too easy to do for a number of technical reasons] or dry them like talcum powder. And that's not easy to do because it's pretty easy to kill them while you are drying them. So I can agree with what the GAO says unless we are dealing with a state sponsor. If we are dealing with Iraq, or with some of these other countries that we know are producing them, then that's another story."
It's this other story that is bothering Washington. The new buzzwords in the capital are "homeland defense." For the last two years the term has been batted around in think tanks and the Pentagon, but it acquired a high profile when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began using it on TV talk shows after the first attack on the continental United States since 1812.
It also was used in the announcement of the call-up of the National Guard. In a Lexis-Nexis search of major newspapers, the term appeared 118 times in the week following the attack, up from 41 references for the rest of 2001.
One of the analysts developing the concept is Randy Larsen, former chairman of the military department at the National War College. He has established the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security specifically to energize thinking about defending U.S. territory, sovereignty, population and infrastructure. (The parent ANSER public-policy research group itself was a spin-off from the RAND Corp. in 1958.)
Larsen says conventional thinking about defense, which dates back to the 1960s, is out of date. "We've had a biological revolution since then," he says. "People with as much money as Osama bin Laden can buy the Russian scientists they need. My point is, this stuff can be made with equipment bought from LABEX.com. It is not difficult to do anymore - it has changed the international-security equation. Still, I put it in the category of low probability, high consequence. What we need is some insurance to make us better prepared for this. We don't need to run around and be paranoid and wear masks."
Reuters,
20th September, 2001US Orders 40 Million Doses Of Smallpox Vaccine For $343 Million
LONDON (Reuters) - Acambis Plc, the British biotechnology company charged with developing a new smallpox vaccine for the United States, said on Thursday it expected to begin clinical trials on the drug early next year.
UK biotech firm could take up to 20 years to fill orderAttention has focused on U.S. vulnerability to biological attack since hijackers slammed passenger aircraft into New York and Washington last week, killing thousands.
The atrocity has given new urgency to Acambis's work to make a smallpox vaccine that meets modern safety standards, more than 20 years after the deadly disease was officially eradicated.
"A major effort is underway on this contract, with around one-fifth of our 100 research and development staff committed to the project," said Acambis Chief Executive John Brown.
Later this year the firm will apply to U.S. regulators for permission to start clinical trials in early 2002. Acambis had aimed to deliver the first doses of vaccine in 2004, but Brown said the process could now be speeded up.
"We will do anything we can to meet this important requirement," he told Reuters in an interview.
Scientists say smallpox and anthrax pose the biggest germ- warfare threats, but only the highly contagious smallpox virus has the potential to blow up into a worldwide plague.
The disease -- a deadly blistering of the skin accompanied by pain and fever -- was wiped out in 1979 after a vaccination programme, but military strategists are concerned that virus samples produced in the Soviet Union during the Cold War could fall into the hands of militant groups or rogue states.
The original smallpox vaccine, which has its origins in the 18th century, was simply a dose of the cattle disease cowpox that appeared to give smallpox immunity to dairy maids who contracted the lesser pox from infected cows.
Cultivated in calves, the old vaccine hardly meets modern safety requirements, and could be kept for only 18 months. The Acambis vaccine should have a shelf-life of five years.
Under the 20-year contract with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Acambis will deliver an initial 40 million doses of the vaccine. The deal is worth an estimated $343 million to the small, Cambridge-based firm.
Andrew Forsyth, biotechnology analyst at stockbroker Williams de Broe, said the U.S. government may decide to buy in more vaccine to protect its people against attack.
Acambis shares have defied stock market gloom since the attacks on the United States. On Thursday they were 4.84 percent higher at 128-3/4 pence, compared with 113 pence on September 11.
WEST NILE VIRUS
Acambis also said it had identified a potential vaccine against the deadly, mosquito-borne West Nile Virus that has invaded North America in recent years. It said it expects to start a clinical trial in 2002, meaning the drug could be on the market in three or four years.The sickness, which can lead to inflammation of the brain and strikes the elderly and people with weak immune systems, first appeared in the New York City area then spread along the east coast. That research is also being funded by a U.S. government grant.
Acambis reported success in a Phase II trial of a vaccine for Japanese encephalitis, a mosquito-borne viral disease prevalent in Asia. Drugs have to undergo three phases of trials before they get regulatory approval.
Acambis reported a net loss of 5.5 million pounds ($8.06 million) in the six months to June 30, unchanged from last year.
Reuters,
September 20th, 2001Acambis to Start U.S. Smallpox Trial
By Janet McBrideLONDON (Reuters) - British biotechnology firm Acambis Plc said on Thursday it would soon begin testing a new smallpox vaccine for the United States amid heightened fears of biological war after attacks on New York and Washington.
Attention has focused on U.S. vulnerability to biological weapons since hijackers slammed passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon last week, killing thousands.
The atrocity has given new urgency to Acambis' work on behalf of the United States government to make a smallpox vaccine that meets modern safety standards, more than 20 years after the deadly disease was officially eradicated.
Scientists say smallpox and anthrax pose the biggest germ- warfare threats, but only smallpox -- a contagious and deadly blistering of the skin accompanied by pain and fever -- has the potential to blow up into a worldwide plague.
Acambis said it expected to begin clinical trials on its vaccine early next year.
"A major effort is underway on this contract, with around one-fifth of our 100 research and development staff committed to the project,'' said Chief Executive John Brown.
Acambis aimed to deliver the first doses of vaccine to the United States in 2004, but Brown said the process could now be speeded up. "We will do anything we can to meet this important requirement,'' he told Reuters in an interview.
Military strategists are concerned that virus samples produced in the Soviet Union during the Cold War could fall into the hands of militant groups or rogue states.
The original smallpox vaccine, which has its origins in the 18th century, was simply a dose of the cattle disease cowpox that seemed to give smallpox immunity to dairy maids. Cultivated in calves, it falls short of modern safety requirements.
Under the 20-year contract with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Acambis will deliver an initial 40 million doses of its laboratory-produced vaccine. The deal is worth around $343 million to the small, Cambridge-based firm.
GERM WEAPONS AS OLD AS WAR
Germ weapons are almost as old as war itself.The Greeks, Romans and Persians polluted the water supplies of their enemies with animal corpses, and medieval armies catapulted diseased bodies into besieged cities to spread infection. Some academics say British settlers deliberately spread smallpox among the Native American population in the late 18th century by distributing infected blankets.
Andrew Forsyth, biotechnology analyst at stockbroker Williams de Broe, said the U.S. government may seek more vaccine to protect its people against attack. Industry sources say other countries are also interested in Acambis' research.
Acambis shares have defied market gloom since the attacks on the United States. On Thursday they were four percent higher at 128 pence, compared with 113 pence on September 11.
Acambis also announced it had identified a potential vaccine against the deadly, mosquito-borne West Nile Virus that has invaded North America. It expects to start a clinical trial in 2002 and the drug could go on sale in three or four years.
The sickness, which can inflame the brain and strikes the elderly and people with weak immune systems, first appeared in the New York City area then spread along the east coast. That research is also being funded by a U.S. government grant.
Acambis reported success in a Phase II trial of a vaccine for Japanese encephalitis, a mosquito-borne viral disease prevalent in Asia. Drugs have to undergo three phases of trials before they get regulatory approval.
Reuters,
October 4, 2001UK Firm Speeds Up Work on U.S. Smallpox Jab
LONDON (Reuters) - British biotechnology firm Acambis Plc said on Thursday it had accelerated work to develop a smallpox vaccine for the United States, amid heightened fears of germ war after the attacks on New York and Washington.A U.S. official said this week that the first 40 million doses of the jab to protect against the deadly disease could arrive next year -- two years ahead of schedule. Acambis has an exclusive contract with the U.S. government to supply the vaccine.
The attacks by hijacked planes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11 have focused attention on U.S. vulnerability to other kinds of assault, including biological and chemical warfare, and added urgency to Acambis' work to produce a vaccine that meets modern safety standards.
On Wednesday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson forecast the vaccine would be ready by mid to late 2002.
"Acambis can confirm that this program has been accelerated but it is unable to give more details at this stage,'' Acambis said in a statement to the London Stock Exchange.
Although smallpox -- a contagious and deadly blistering of the skin accompanied by pain and fever -- was officially eradicated over 20 years ago, there are fears that virus samples produced in the Soviet Union during the Cold War could fall into the hands of militant groups or rogue states.
When the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan released sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995, it forced governments to accept that extreme groups could use such weapons.
Under a 20-year contract with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Acambis is to supply an initial 40 million doses of a vaccine that meets modern safety standards. Clinical trials are due to start next year.
The U.S. government is expected to seek more doses of the vaccine to protect its people against attack. Industry sources say other countries are also interested in buying in the jab.
The original smallpox vaccine, which has its origins in the 18th century, was simply a dose of the cattle disease cowpox that seemed to give smallpox immunity to dairy maids. Cultivated in calves, it falls short of modern safety requirements.
Scientists say smallpox and anthrax pose the biggest germ- warfare threats, but only smallpox has the potential to spread into a worldwide plague.
Acambis' shares have surged almost 40 percent since the September 11 attacks, defying a slump in global stock markets. On Thursday, the shares were 2.5 pence down at 165-1/2p.
NewsMax.com Wires
Monday, September 24, 2001DOD: Biowar Protection Will Cost $3.2B
WASHINGTON -- Mindful of the increasing threat of a biological or chemical weapons attack by terrorists, the Defense Department wants to develop 15 new vaccines at a cost of $3.2 billion over 12 years, according to a Pentagon report released Monday.The Defense Department determined it needs not only a new anthrax vaccine but at least 13 other new vaccines, including serum for small pox, next-generation anthrax, the plague, three varieties of equine encephalitis, coxiella burnetii, Tularemia, botulinum toxin, staphlococcyl enterotoxin b, ricin and brucella, the report said.
The department also needs vaccines to protect deployed soldiers against diseases local to their area of operations - malaria, dengue fever, HIV, hepatitis E and shigellosis.
The report is significant in the light of revelations that a suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington had inquired about crop dusters in Florida, sparking fears the planes could be used to spread biological or chemical agents. Subsequently, the government grounded the nation's privately owned fleet of crop dusters.
The Defense Department has long been aware that biological weapons pose a special threat to its forces. The diseases that can be "weaponized" - such as anthrax or small pox - take up to eight days to incubate, so infected soldiers show no serious symptoms until well after the exposure. In the case of small pox, infected soldiers would be contagious to others well before anyone knew they were sick.
An independent panel of experts told the Defense Department in November 2000 that it will cost $370 million to build a new vaccine production facility able to manufacturer eight different inoculations. It will cost an additional $300 million a year to operate, and it will take as long as 12 years to develop the vaccines. The Defense Department set aside funding in its 2001 budget earmarked for the construction of such a facility, which would be government owned but operated by private contractors.
Developing and producing 15 new vaccines, if only for military personnel, is an ambitious project by any estimation: It would nearly double the number of vaccines available in the world. Just 20 vaccines are commercially available. Merck Pharmaceuticals, the largest private producer, manufacturers nine of them.
The Pentagon began requiring vaccinations against anthrax for all military service members three years ago but has repeatedly slowed the controversial program because of waning supplies. There is still no FDA-approved manufacturer of anthrax vaccine in the United States. The military has been drawing on old supplies produced by a now-defunct Michigan state-owned laboratory.
About 500,000 of the 2.4 million active duty and reserve military personnel have begun the required six-shot course of anthrax vaccine. Deployed soldiers also regularly receive the following vaccinations: Hepatitis A, Cholera, Japanese encephalitis, Typhoid, Yellow Fever and influenza. Military personnel also receive vaccines against Meningococcus and Adenovirus when they enter basic training.
In the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI said, some 19 men, all with Muslim names, hijacked four U.S. commercial jetliners. Two were guided into the twin towers of the World Trade Center; a third smashed into the Pentagon and the fourth went down in rural Pennsylvania. Some 6,000 people are feared to have died in the attacks.
Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.
LINK: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/9/24/142512.shtml
Wired.com
23rd September, 2001State Of America's Bio Defense -
By Kristen Philipkoski
Not Good - We Are VulnerableTerrorists likely have considered biological weapons and may be working on ways to deploy them, biological warfare experts say.
Certainly after the Sept. 11 attacks, anything seems possible. The experts also say, however, it will take a level of scientific know-how to execute a biological attack that terrorists most likely don't have.
"The expertise of the terrorists is more along the lines of a traditional attack using high explosives, but that doesn't mean they're not trying," said Jim Lewis, the director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Even if Lewis is correct, that doesn't mean a biological attack can't happen. The chances a terrorist organization does have bio-weapons increases dramatically if it is sponsored by, say, Iraq or Pakistan, or another of the many countries that have the scientific infrastructure in place to produce bio-weapons.
By 1991, Iraqis had created weapons of anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
They didn't use them in the Gulf War, although they did release chemical weapons on the Kurds in 1988. The former Soviet Union also had bio-warfare capabilities before its collapse.
Although the United Nations destroyed what appeared to be the final remains of the Iraqi offensive program in 1996, the United Nations Special Commission is not confident that Iraq has abandoned biological weapons research.
According to Jay Davis, a national security fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and former director of the defense threat reduction agency at the Department of Defense, it's also possible that terrorists have been working on developing a biological weapon for many years, if one were to judge by the intricate and persistent planning that went into the attack last week.
If anything is clear, it's that the United States is incapable of dealing with a biological attack -- a situation that has been hammered home perhaps too loudly to terrorists, said Mark Wheelis, a professor of microbiology and a bioweapons historian at the University of California at Davis.
"If terrorists are interested in biological weapons, it's probably our fault since we had the Secretary of Defense going on TV saying this is America's greatest vulnerability," Wheelis said.
If terrorists did succeed, and anthrax, smallpox, bubonic plague, tularemia or any of many other potentially deadly microbes were released upon American civilians, it's likely they would go undetected until people started getting sick. That might be too late.
A World Health Organization study estimated that if a tularemia biological weapon were used against a modern city of 5 million people, it would cause 250,000 illnesses and 19,000 deaths.
The attack would trigger cases of pneumonia, pleuritis and lymph node disease within three to five days after exposure. Unless treated with effective antibiotics, the disease could lead to serious illness including respiratory failure, shock or death.
Researchers are looking for ways to detect bio-attacks before they cause sickness, but no 100 percent reliable technologies exist to date.
"There are sensors that are in the research and development mode that can be brought to bear to detect some biological pathogens, but we've got a long way to go," said Frank Cilluffo, senior policy analyst and deputy director of the Global Organized Crime Project at CSIS.
The military has a set of technologies that sample the air for particles and then perform what's called a PCR analysis to identify them. Using PCR -- polymerase chain reaction -- scientists can rapidly replicate DNA from a very small sample.
One limitation of the technology is that it takes at least an hour to get enough DNA for a detection device to take a reading. The technology is also prone to false positives and negatives, so officials have to guess whether a threat is serious enough to evacuate a public building.
"Say you get a false positive and you evacuate the Capitol building -- you can't do that too many times," Davis said.
The military is stepping up efforts to manufacture more and better bio-sensors.
A company called InnovaTek in Richland, Washington, is funded by the Army and the Navy to develop and manufacture a technology that collects particles small enough to be inhaled by human beings.
Since last week's terrorist attacks, the military has scaled up the project by "100 times," said InnovaTek president and CEO Patricia Irving, although she couldn't give specific numbers.
"The staff is working day and night on this issue," Irving said. "We have people adding a second shift to deliver this product. We're dedicated to doing whatever we can to provide the technology that will help protect people from terrorism."
A perfect system would detect biological weapons to warn people rather than to alert medical facilities.
"You'd love for it to be as fast as a smoke detector," Davis said.
With hopes of achieving a perfect system, researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other agencies have embarked on efforts to use a technology called mass spectrometry. "Mass spec," as it's referred to, can separate proteins from cells, and the results would be essentially instantaneous.
The Department of Defense signed a contract earlier this year with Bruker Daltonics in Billerica, Massachusetts, to purchase mass spectrometers for chemical and biological defense over the next two years for more than $10 million.
The Defense Department
Even this technology is not free of false positives and would require backup confirmation from PCR or other devices. The trick will be situating bio-sensors where an attack takes place. Putting them too many places would result in too many false positives and needless evacuations. But it's difficult to predict where an attack will occur.
In the event that a bio-attack escapes detection, there are unfortunately no antidotes for diseases caused by, for example, anthrax. The only possible treatment is an intense dose of antibiotics, which according to the Office of the Secretary of Defense can reduce the risk of death from 99 percent to 80 percent.
An anthrax vaccine is available. It can cause allergic reactions in some people but is often administered to people who work with animals and military personnel.
The government needs to give pharmaceutical companies incentives to develop antidotes, since, thankfully, there isn't a commercial market for them, said Cilluffo of the CSIS.
"We need to find ways to best tap into the biomedical community, because they're at the leading edge of technology much more so than Uncle Sam," Cilluffo said.
Ultimately, protecting the country from a biological attack will require a collaboration between the leaders in national intelligence, pharmaceuticals, both animal and plant agriculture (since attackers could also target the food supply) and national defense.
"This does not lend itself to setting up 'the bio-defense agency,'" Davis said. "It's the number two or three job for everyone. No one owns the whole problem."
President Nixon signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 stating that the United States would never develop, produce, stockpile, acquire or retain bio-warfare agents or the means to deliver them.
LINK: http://www.wired.com/news/print/0%2C1294%2C46924%2C00.html
THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 23, 2001Defense May Be Inadequate for Germ or Toxic Attacks
By William J. Broad and Melody PetersenMinutes after two jets slammed into the World Trade Center, an elite team of 22 soldiers was ordered from its base in Scotia, N.Y., to the scene of the disaster, the world's worst terror attack.
By 8:30 that night, the unit had deployed special gear in New York City and was quietly sampling the air, making sure the terrorists had released no deadly germs or toxic chemicals, which in theory could cause widespread illness and death.
No such dangers were found. But despite the fast start, experts say civil defenses across the nation are a rudimentary patchwork that could prove inadequate for what might lie ahead, especially lethal germs, which are considered some of the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Many experts approve of President Bush's decision to appoint a cabinet secretary for Homeland Security, calling it an important step toward protecting civilians against terrorist arms.
The emergency teams "did very well in dealing with this attack," Tara O'Toole, a physician at the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview. "But we've never really had a test of the hospital system where people in large numbers required sophisticated medical care."
Moreover, there are no measures to routinely check for biological attack. Instead, the authorities rely on reports from doctors that people are seeking medical attention for unusual symptoms. That is why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta issued a national alert on Sept. 11 calling on public health officials to "initiate heightened surveillance for any unusual disease occurrence or increased numbers of illnesses that might be associated with today's events."
The alert is still in effect. "We haven't heard a thing," one federal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said of any reports of unusual disease patterns.
But medical experts often fault this approach as inadequate, especially because symptoms of serious illness often appear days and weeks after an infection has begun to spread and when life-saving treatments are no longer effective.
The nation is "woefully unprepared to deal with bioterrorism," Jerome M. Hauer, former head of emergency management for New York City, told Congress two months ago.
How serious is the threat? Today it is considered low. Experts say that biological weapons, with few exceptions, are hard to make and use. In the early 1990's, Aum Shinriko, a Japanese cult, launched germ attacks in and around Tokyo that were meant to kill millions. The strikes produced no known injuries or deaths.
But the chances that some rogue state or terrorist group will successfully deploy germ weapons are seen as rising, as knowledge of how to make deadly weapons spreads, along with the necessary technology.
"There's a greater risk of dying on the highway than from exposure to anthrax," said Jonathan B. Tucker, a germ-weapons expert in the Washington, D.C., office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
But Dr. Tucker cautioned that the attacks on New York and near Washington were unusual in showing a high degree of care and preparation, suggesting that terrorists "may be able to overcome the technical hurdles" to mass destruction, especially if aided by rogue states or scientists.
George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence, warned Congress last year that terrorists were exploring how "rapidly evolving and spreading technologies might enhance the lethality of their operations." A number of groups, he said, are seeking germ, chemical, radiological or nuclear arms.
Mr. Tenet added that operatives of Osama bin Laden, the renegade Saudi millionaire suspected in the Sept. 11 attacks, "have trained to conduct attacks with toxic chemicals or biological toxins."
Military experts say germ weapons can be cheaper, stealthier and potentially more devastating than nuclear arms, though hard for terrorists to acquire and use without hurting themselves.
Shock waves from the recent suicide attacks, experts agree, could help forge a consensus to erect better defenses against unconventional weapons, reversing decades of neglect of civil defense. Many government reports and private experts have criticized recent efforts as wasteful, poorly coordinated among some 40 federal agencies and ill suited for dealing with a wide spectrum of possible threats.
The Clinton administration, rocked by terrorist attacks on Americans at home and abroad, embarked on a wide but sporadic campaign to build civil defenses. Among other things, the campaign established a national stockpile of drugs and vaccines and on Sept. 11, Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, authorized the first shipments from it, sending truckloads of emergency drugs, bandages, dressings and other medical supplies to New York City.
Even so, Dr. O'Toole of the Johns Hopkins center said, the nation has vaccines or drugs to combat only about a dozen of the 50 pathogens thought to be the likeliest threats.
As part of the stockpile push, the disease control centers last year awarded a $343 million contract for making 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine, the first of which is due in 2004. The disease is a contagious killer of high fevers and open sores.
Though smallpox was eliminated from human populations in the late 1970's, stocks of the virus still exist and making vaccine has become a priority as worries over bioterrorism have grown.
The United States has on hand roughly 7.5 million vaccine doses, said Dr. Tucker in "Scourge," a new book on smallpox. That amount, he added, is "inadequate to cope with even a medium-sized outbreak that might result from a bioterrorist attack."
This year, federal and private officials met to act out how the government would cope with a smallpox outbreak. The exercise, code named Dark Winter, ended in chaos when the spreading disease overwhelmed all attempts at containment.
"Most state and local governments have not begun to address the issues that Dark Winter presented," Mr. Hauer told a House Government Reform subcommittee in July. "An incident using biological agents will likely go unnoticed for days, and the typical response of the first responders will have little impact. It is not a `lights and sirens' type of incident."
In the last few years, New York City has quietly undertaken many efforts to counter attacks with deadly chemicals or germs.
One program, the kind that the disease control centers called for nationally on Sept. 11, monitors patterns of emergency hospitalizations. Another trains city police officers and firefighters to handle such emergencies, including the decontamination of materials and people.
Stephen S. Morse, a biologist at Columbia University who directs its Center for Public Health Preparedness, which is part of a new national network of such groups run by the disease control centers, recently helped the city set up a program for training school nurses as well.
"Their main role would be sheltering people and ministering in the shelters," Mr. Morse said. "You hope for the best, and prepare for the worst."
The Defense Department, meanwhile, is continuing a wide effort, begun in the Clinton administration, to have university scientists and biotech companies come up with innovative ways to combat a variety of disease agents.
LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/national/23GERM.html
The Washington Post
September 23, 2001Editorial: Taking Bio-Warfare Seriously
In the wake of the terrorist assaults, this country can no longer afford to be complacent about the possibility of biological terrorism. Biological attacks are often dismissed as far-out science fiction or as beyond moral imagination. They are neither. The terrorists have no moral limits, and a crude attack with biological weapons is probably simpler to pull off than what the terrorists accomplished already. Moreover, the country is woefully unprepared for germ warfare. This is an area that needs sustained, high-level attention.Several of the most dangerous biological warfare agents -- plague and anthrax, for example -- respond to antibiotics, so quick detection of an outbreak and rapid availability of drugs could save huge numbers of lives. But it is critical that adequate supplies of drugs be available and that plans exist for efficient distribution. Yet the planning has been caught up in turf battles, and a serious attack would likely overwhelm the medical system. Moreover, supplies of vaccines for such diseases as smallpox and anthrax are limited.
Another problem -- one the Bush administration has sought to address in its proposed anti-terrorism legislation -- is current criminal law and the regulatory control over potentially deadly microbes. The law forbids only the possession of such materials "for use as a weapon," putting an onerous burden on prosecutors to show malevolent intent in order to bring a case. Moreover, the law specifically exempts "prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes" from its coverage, giving would-be terrorists a potential defense in any case the government does pursue. Designing an appropriate legal regime is difficult, both because the microbes in question are naturally occurring and because the same microbes that can serve as deadly weapons are also essential for research into curing and preventing disease. But this should not prevent the development of a rigorous licensing and regulatory regime and stiff criminal penalties for those who cultivate biological warfare agents without permission.
LINK: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7168-2001Sep21?language=printer
The Guardian, UK,
September 24, 2001Killer germs
In July the Bush administration blocked a new treaty to tighten up the ban on biological weapons. September 11 might make it think again by James MeekAfter the Gulf war, when it was realised how close the Iraqis came to using chemical weapons against allied troops, President George Bush Sr was converted to the idea that the 1925 treaty banning first use of chemical weapons was inadequate. There had to be an international system of spot-checks to make sure signatories to the treaty were playing by the rules.
The president turned the US into a chemical warfare white knight, abandoning his country's commitment to respond to chemical attacks in kind and pledging destruction of all US chemical weapons stocks. Efforts to get international monitoring on a sound footing moved on to the fast track. In 1997, the chemical weapons convention came into force, a powerful system to prevent development, stockpiling or production of chemical weapons, backed by a 500-strong inspection agency based in the Hague.
There was another set of weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had ready for use during the war: germ weapons. Iraqi scientists and engineers had tested biological bombs and devices to spray biological agents from fighter jets and helicopters, and had filled the warheads of Scud missiles with anthrax and botulin toxin, which is responsible for botulism.
Yet Bush Sr did not push with the same enthusiasm for tighter controls on bio-weapons. And a few weeks ago, when the world was on the brink of signing up to the same kind of strict controls on bio-weapons it had accepted for their chemical counterparts, the US outraged other negotiators by rejecting the deal. At the time, the US stance - which led to the collapse of talks on an enforcement protocol for the 1975 biological and toxin weapons convention (BTWC) - was chalked up as another example of its new isolationism.
The events of September 11, however, could change the fate of the BTWC. Supporters of the protocol believe President George Bush Jr could be converted to the merits of international control over weapons of mass destruction, as his father was by the Gulf war.
In the past, the thinking was that bio-weapons were not much use to terrorists. They were hard to make and use, and any advantage gained by a group which used them would be outweighed by damage to their political cause from the mass revulsion their use would engender. But the skill involved in planning and executing the September 11 attacks and the disregard for civilian lives have made governments think again. For the first time, US national guard germ warfare units have been deployed in the homeland.
"This is on a scale beyond anything I'd ever thought about, so the threat of terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction becomes a distinct possibility," says Alastair Hay, professor of environmental toxicology at Leeds University.
Cultivating viruses and microbes for bio-warfare is not simple. Governments have found it difficult to make a device to spread biological warfare agents over a wide area without rendering them ineffective. Yet the risk remains. A weapon could be aimed at humans - a virus like smallpox, which would spread before the symptoms appeared, or an agent like anthrax, which usually kills anyone who inhales its spores. It could be aimed at crops, or animals, and it does not have to be fatal to cause immense damage.
US objections to the BWTC protocol don't seem to be based on underestimating the dangers. In 1998 the then US defence secretary, William Cohen, went on television carrying a 5lb bag of sugar to show how little anthrax would be needed to kill half the population of Washington. Earlier this month, it emerged that the US government had secretly carried out trials to assess how effective biological weapons available to terrorists might be. One test involved building a working copy of a Soviet-designed bio-bomb; another, building a germ warfare plant in Nevada using civilian materials. The tests showed a terrorist group or "rogue nation" could do either easily.
A state department briefing on July 25, explaining US reluctance to sign up to the BTWC protocol, said that implementation would cause problems for US biological weapons defence programmes, risk foreign powers stealing commercial US pharmaceutical and biotech secrets through snap inspections, and jeopardise existing American controls over exports of materials which could be used to make bio-weapons.
An analysis of US objections by Bradford University's department of peace studies demolishes these arguments. The protocol protects bio-weapons defence programmes from unwarranted prying, makes elaborate provisions to protect commercial secrets and would spread US-style export controls more widely around the world.
It is unlikely other countries can go forward without the US. "Without the US on board, we won't get Russia," says one observer. "If we don't get Russia, we won't get China; if we don't get China, we won't get India and Pakistan, and without them, there'll be no Iran."
Despite the hopes that the events of September 11 will lead to a change of heart by the Bush administration, there is another possibility: that the US is keeping its options open, in case the genetics revolution leads to a breakthrough in biological war-fighting technology that it cannot forswear or risk having to declare under the protocol.
This might prove short-sighted. Military genetics research, more than nuclear research, is a game many can play. "What we are really worried about is what happens in 10 years, when the biotech revolution spreads around the world," says one bio-weapons specialist. "The protocol would be a small insurance policy."
James Meek is the Guardian's science correspondent. james.meek@guardian.co.uk
LINK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/analysis/story/0,3604,556933,00.html
LOS ANGELES TIMES
24th September, 2001Editorial: Getting Ahead of Bioterror
Terrorists' success at using passenger jets as giant napalm bombs has left national security experts scrambling to anticipate and shield the nation against other threats. Some of those threats bear more resemblance to science fiction fantasy than to documented, imminent danger. But one in particular--the chance that one day terrorists might attack the United States with biological agents like smallpox and anthrax, sometimes called "the poor man's nuclear bomb"--was rightly receiving close attention from President Bush and Congress in the weeks just before the Sept. 11 attacks.At a Senate hearing Sept. 5, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called bioterrorism "a significant threat to our country," and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) concluded that the Pentagon's "standard operating procedures" do not adequately guard Americans against it.
Experts point out that the threat of a bioweapons attack remains purely theoretical. The only documented deaths caused by bioweapons came in World War II when Japanese soldiers used infectious agents to kill prisoners and in 1979 when about 100 people were killed by accidental release of anthrax at a Soviet military facility in Sverdlovsk, Russia. And although defectors from the Al Qaeda group allege that Osama Bin Laden had tried to acquire viruses from Russia, botulinum toxin from the Czech Republic and anthrax from North Korea, there is no evidence that he or any other terrorist succeeded. In fact, the lack of good military intelligence about the bioweapons threat is the nub of the problem.
At the Senate hearing, Frist, a physician, called existing bioweapons surveillance "woefully inadequate," and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey expressed a "great fear" that some of the 22,000 Russian scientists who had been involved in the Soviet Union's bioweapons programs might be lured, with a few thousand dollars, into developing such weapons for Iraq or even Bin Laden.
While federal officials admit they were completely unprepared for the Sept. 11 aircraft attacks, they had been working in recent months to develop a national bioweapons defense system. The Pentagon had staged bioterror war games, and last month Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson named a special advisor on bioterrorism.
Federal officials, however, need more help from Congress. Legislators should direct $1 billion of their $40-billion anti-terrorism package to defending against biochemical attacks. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has proposed such funding, mainly to develop vaccines, teach emergency room nurses and doctors how to distinguish between genuine biowarfare and hoaxes or scares, and help pay for international bioweapons surveillance.
A bioweapons attack using an agent like smallpox is almost impossible to imagine. As we now know, that's no reason to dismiss it.
THE NEW YORK TIMES,
September 30, 2001Some See U.S. as Vulnerable in Germ Attack
By Sheryl Gay StolbergWASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - The United States is inadequately prepared to confront bioterrorist attacks, according to a broad range of health experts and officials. The nation must develop new vaccines and treatments, they say, but it must also fortify its fragile public health infrastructure, the first line of defense in detecting and containing biological threats.
Bioterrorism - the intentional release of potentially lethal viruses or bacteria into the air, food or water supply - poses daunting technical challenges, and experts say it would be difficult to carry out a successful attack. Still, many believe it is inevitable that someone will eventually try it in the United States.
In the weeks since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, much of the discussion about bioterrorism has centered on a shortage of antibiotics and vaccines. But the bigger problem, officials agree, is a lack of basic public health infrastructure and preparedness that could thwart a terror attack or limit its effects.
Doctors are poorly trained to recognize symptoms of infection with possible biological weapons, like plague and anthrax, which can resemble the flu. Many of the nation's hospitals lack necessary equipment - in some cases even simple tools like fax machines - to receive or report information in an emergency. Though a number of federal agencies have established bioterrorism response teams and procedures, and there has been steady improvement in laboratory facilities around the country to test and identify biological agents, the result is a patchwork, set against a larger patchwork of cities, counties and states with their own reporting requirements and plans.
"For bioterrorism, the No. 1 inadequacy, if you had to rank them, is the inadequacy of our public health infrastructure," said Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee. "That is a product of about 15 years of neglect."
In a report issued last week, the General Accounting Office said the government's bioterrorism planning was so disjointed that the agencies involved could not even agree on which biological agents posed the biggest threat. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, consider smallpox a major risk. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not even put smallpox on its list.
At the same time, there are holes in the federal bureaucracy, where two important health positions remain unfilled: commissioner of food and drugs and director of the National Institutes of Health. The Food and Drug Administration will play a crucial role in the development of vaccines or treatments for use in the event of a biological attack, but President Bush and Congress - in particular Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts - have been unable to agree on an acceptable nominee.
Federal officials got a taste of how complicated, and chilling, a bioterrorist attack could be during a war game played at Andrews Air Force base, outside Washington, in June. The exercise, code-named Dark Winter, began with a report of a single case of smallpox in Oklahoma City. By the time it was over, the imaginary epidemic had spread to 25 states and killed several million people. As it unfolded, growing grimmer and grimmer, the government quickly ran out of vaccine, forcing officials to make life-and-death decisions about who would be protected - health workers? soldiers? - and whether the military would have to be brought in to quarantine patients.
"Dark Winter showed just how unprepared we are to deal with bioterrorism," said Jerome M. Hauer, the former head of emergency management in New York City and now a bioterrorism consultant to Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. "It pointed out that there were significant challenges to all levels of government."
To meet those challenges, Senators Kennedy and Frist are urging President Bush to spend at least $1 billion on a range of measures that, they say, will improve the ability of health officials to combat bioterrorism. In an interview, Mr. Thompson agreed that improvements were needed, although he said the government was prepared to handle an attack right now.
"I would like to expand our pharmaceutical supplies," Mr. Thompson said. "I would like to strengthen the public health system. I would like to get some more inspectors for the food supply. I would like to expand security in our laboratories. I would like to purchase more vaccine."
For years, federal officials considered the threat of bioterrorism to be negligible. But concern began to mount in 1995, after a Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, launched nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo subways. In the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, some members of the public have developed intense fears of germ warfare, and are trying to stock up on their own supplies.
"We have people buying gas masks and antibiotics when that is not going to provide real protection," said Stephen S. Morse, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University.
Mr. Thompson said the administration was "very confident that we could act and react to any kind of bioterrorist breakout." But while Dr. Morse and other public health experts say the nation is better prepared than it was even three or four years ago, they do not share that confidence.
For instance, the United States has only 7 to 15 million doses of smallpox vaccine on hand - estimates vary - while experts estimate that at least 40 million would be needed to combat a serious epidemic. Under a government contract, a company in Cambridge, Mass., is testing a new vaccine, but it will not be available until 2004 at the earliest.
But perhaps the most pressing need, many health experts say, is improving the nation's ability to recognize when a biological attack is under way.
"We are not going to have a bomb fly out of the sky and land on somebody so that we can say, `Look, there's a bomb, and we are all dying of
