Bioterror: A Phantom Menace?
Should we really be afraid of bioterrorism? This was the question raised on Thursday night at the Science Gallery when Dr Arthur Friedlander gave his first ever public discussion on this theme since the tumultous events of the 2001 anthrax attacks in Washington DC that brought his research laboratory, USAMRIID, forcibly into the public gaze.
Friedlander, a low-key academic with a wry sense of humour, is best known as the leading scientist at the United States Army's bioweapons research facility in Maryland, and a leading international authority on anthrax and plague. His laboratory initially had a key role in investigating the 2001 anthrax attacks in which letters containing anthrax spores (left) were sent to Tom Daschle and other public figures, leading to five deaths and a large number of injuries, especially of mail handling employees. In an astonishing twist of circumstances, the FBI then investigated Friedlander's lab itself as the source of the weaponized anthrax spores in the letters, pointing the finger at a specific employee, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide when it became clear that the FBI were about to arrest him.
We will probably never know exactly what happened in 2001. Friedlander was not going to be drawn on questioning about this episode by Trinity College biochemist Luke O'Neill. However the numbers tell an interesting story. Five deaths from anthrax inhalation, an economic cost of $5bn, and a massive subsequent investment of $50bn in new labs and the stockpiling of vaccines and drugs in the US. The New York Times intimated that the anthrax attacks were motivated by a desire to earn royalties from an anthrax vaccine, but this claim was ridiculed by Friedlander on Thursday who pointed out the severe limitations on royalty earnings for government employees.
The question remains -- just how serious is the risk of bioterror, given all of the other risks to our health (say diabetes and heart disease) competing for research funding? In the 1990s, the Japanese cult of Aum Shinryoko was determined to create an apocalyptic scenario through biological or chemical agents and had hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, and twenty scientists working on biological weapons, with a further eighty working on chemical weapons. In spite of their massive resources, their attempts to use Ebola and Botulinum Toxin (the most toxic agent known, but also something we pay to get injected into our faces as Botox) in bio-weapons attacks were complete and utter failures, suggesting that it is not as easy as we might think to succesfully deploy a biological weapon. They were more successful with chemical weapons, with the notorious Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway resulting in numerous deaths but still the fatalities resulting from seventeen separate attacks by the wealthy Japanese cult were significantly fewer than those in Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bomb made from fertiliser, as pointed out by Dan Gardner in his book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear. A slightly more successful bioterror effort was the contamination of salad bars with Salmonella by the Rajneeshee sect in 1984, with the intention of influencing the results of the election in The Dalles, Oregon, causing 751 people to become ill (Luke joked that he hoped nobody from Fianna Fail was listening).
What are we to make of this? Should we really be investing billions in bioweapons defense? Friedlander nonetheless pointed to a rather terrifying map of the Washington DC area, showing the effects of an airplane dropping weaponized anthrax over the city, with devastating results. Since 2001, a programme called BioWatch has been set up in the US to monitor airborne pathogens as an "early warning system" for a bioterror attack. While this has yet to detect any anthrax, it has, according to Friedlander, been a wonderful boost to research on airborne microbes and their distribution, something about which we previously knew next to nothing.
In tracing the long history of bioterror, Friedlander pointed out that the concept of bioterror is even present in the Old Testament, quoting the following remarkable passage from the Book of Exodus:
Then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Take handfuls of soot from a furnace, and have Moses throw it into the air while Pharaoh is watching. It will become fine dust over the whole land of Egypt and will cause boils to break out and fester on both people and animals in all the land of Egypt.†So they took soot from a furnace and stood before Pharaoh, Moses threw it into the air, and it caused festering boils to break out on both people and animals." (Exodus 9:8-10)
Examples of attempts to infect enemies deliberately with smallpox were also a feature of the colonization of the Americas. The idea of deliberate infection is something that has a disturbing, visceral effect on us that may lead us to overestimate the risk. Medieval siege battle involving the catapulting of plague-infected corpses over city walls is possibly the most graphic image of early biological warfare.
However the somewhat reassuring conclusion of the evening seemed to be that bioterror and biological warfare are extremely difficult to carry out effectively, even with massive resources. Another reassuring thing, for Irish people at least, is that airborne anthrax attacks don't seem to work well in wet, windy weather. On the other hand it was slightly more unsettling to discover that bubonic plague is endemic in parts of the South West USA (Arizona and New Mexico, where it affects the prairie dog population), so I probably won't be going camping in those parts in the near future.
The discussion with Dr Friedlander was chaired by Luke O'Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin and co-curator of the INFECTIOUS exhibition, which continues in the Science Gallery until July 17.
Links:
Scientist's Suicide Linked to Anthrax Enquiry, New York Times, 02.08.2008
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