Noah Shachtman's site: BIGGER WORRIES THAN BIOCHEM
BIGGER WORRIES THAN BIOCHEM
"why is America spending billions to defend against on a large-scale biochem attack that'll almost certainly never come?
So it's no surprise that, since 1900, there have been only 40 recorded bio-attacks. Compare that to conventional terrorist strikes, the ones using guns and
bs. There have been more than 650 of them worldwide -- just since the start of 2002, observes Gary Ackerman, with the
Center for Nonprofileration Studies, in a soon-to-be-published article. What's more, "there has never been a single bioterrorist incident with more than 15 fatalities -- an all-too-common occurrence when terrorists use conventional weapons," he writes.
Despite this, the Department of Homeland Security's 2004 budget, signed into law last Wednesday, allocates nearly $900 million for "Project BioShield," an effort to prep vaccines and treatments for biological and other threats; $88 million for the "National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center," to protect people and crops from germ attacks; $38 million for air filters to catch pathogens; $84 million for the public health system, to treat biological and chemical-attack victims; the list goes on, just about endlessly. And it doesn't even begin to touch the $1.2 billion the Pentagon wants to spend next year on chem-bio detection, the $1.6-or-so billion from the National Institutes of Health, or the $600 million that President Bush wants to spend to keep looking for Saddam's unconventional stash.
THERE'S MORE: A number of people wrote in, expressing upset with this story. But JB -- a doctor -- was the most eloquent, by far. Here's what he had to say:
Your analysis and conclusions are probably correct, with regard to both chemical weapons and biotoxins such as botulinum.
But they are utterly and dangerously incorrect when applied to biological agents that can infect humans, reproduce and amplify themselves and then spread to other people. Then it is not a question of quantity or dispersion, but of creating an agent with the right incubation period, mode of transmission and lethality, and then introducing it into the target environment in the proper way.
All of which is, unfortunately, now easy.
You may have heard of the Australian mousepox experiments, the news of which made quite a stir in interested circles a year and a half ago or so. Researchers, in an effort to use mousepox virus (a normally mild, nonlethal murine infection) as a vector for a cytokine (IL-4) to induce inflammation in infected mice and suppress their reproduction, found that the insertion of the gene for that cytokine turned this little nothing disease into a fatal one, and that previously useful mousepox vaccine became fairly ineffective, to boot.
Note that mousepox is related to the virus that causes human smallpox, that you can buy the necessary materials mail order easy as you please, and that the technology for inserting a gene for this or something else into an existing viral genome is trivial, and could be done by any grad student in the subject with access to any reasonable university or industrial molecular bio/genetics lab.
This, of course, is just an example. You could just as well modify Ebola virus to extend its non-prostrating contagious period a little, so epidemics would spread instead of burning out, etc. etc.
The danger is acute. We are now in a period of time, which may last 10 years or so (no one knows), in which the ability to create such genetically modified killers is widespread, but the ability to identify, respond to, and neutralize them quickly enough to avert catastrophe, has not yet developed. And every day's news reminds us that the irrational evil that would not for a moment hesitate to use such a weapon continues to exist in the world.
By downplaying the need to use all available methods and strategies (including, of course, pre-emptive military action when necessary) to prevent this threat from killing millions of innocents is wrong."