- Terrorists 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
<news/technology/0,1282,16550,00.htmlfirst
used Bruker's spectrometers as part of the Army's Biological Integrated
Detection System.
-
- 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.
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