A rchive Date
[ 17-02-2002 ]
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[ International Relations ]
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[ Science & Technology ]
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[http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/thismorning/sites/health/biologicalwarfare_010325.html
Bio-terrorism: The Eleventh Plague
Producer: Bob Carty
Broadcast March 25, 2001
Swarms of frogs, gnats, flies and locusts. Livestock diseased. People with boils. Hail storms that kill, rivers that turn to blood, daytime that turns dark. And the death of the firstborn child.
Those are the ten terrible plagues of the Old Testament. Today, however, scientists and military experts say we should be worried about a new affliction - the eleventh plague. It's the use of living things like plague, smallpox, anthrax, and new diseases like Ebola, as weapons of mass destruction - and mass terror.
Strategic experts say that a dozen nation states and an equal number of terrorist groups may now possess biological weapons. That possibility is why, just six weeks ago, officials evacuated hundreds of people from buildings in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver when it was feared that they had been infected by biological agents.
For a long time, officials in western democratic societies were reluctant to talk about biological terrorism. Talking about it might encourage it. But that's changed in the last few years. The threat of a biological attack against a North American city is now so great that officials feel the topic must be broached. And discussed. And assessed.
In downtown Ottawa, the Department of Citizenship and Immigration has offices in a dull, 21-story office tower. Though it wasn't so dull last January 30th. Employees were opening the mail. One package, addressed to the Minister, contained a plastic bag filled with a bluish powder. There was no message - no overt threat. But there are procedures for these things.
Security officers examined the substance and decided it was not explosive, not radioactive, not chemical. But they did suspect it was biological - perhaps something like anthrax, a highly infectious bacteria that can be deadly to humans. 600 employees were cleared from the building. The employees exposed to the substance were sent to hospital and started on an immediate regime of antibiotics. The package was sealed and shipped off for testing.
Dr. Ron St. John heads the Centre for Emergency Preparedness at Health Canada. He's one of the people in charge of making sure Canadian health, police, fire and emergency crews are ready for a possible biological attack.
The incident in Ottawa turned out to be a false alarm; the bluish substance was absolutely harmless. You might think officials would be embarrassed by their over-reaction. Not so. They're actually pleased the reaction was so strong and swift. They believe the threat of bio-terrorism is very real.
Quietly, for the past three years, American and Canadian emergency defense teams have been training for a bio-terrorist attack. And they often train with scenarios -- simulations of what an attack would look like and how authorities would react. Those scenarios have been developed by bioterrorism experts like Michael Osterholm and D. A. Henderson.
The place is a university stadium in a North American city. A basketball contest between old rivals. Marching bands. Cheering crowds. Amid the excitement no one notices someone attaching a small box near a ventilation duct. It will go unnoticed for weeks.
The little box on the wall is an aerosol dispenser and it contains an ancient killer - smallpox.
Twelve days after the basketball game, a young women shows up at a hospital emergency room. She complains of fever and muscle aches. Doctors tell her she has the flu. They send her home.
Two days later, the young woman shows up at the hospital again. This time she's very ill. Doctors admit her and begin tests. The tests come back - she has smallpox. By now, it's too late. She's already infected dozens of other patients, hospital staff and visitors. Her condition is critical.
Eighteen days after being exposed at the basketball stadium, the young woman dies. Twenty other cases show up in the city and in five other states and one Canadian province. Officials only have a limited amount of vaccine. And they know the second wave of infected victims is about to begin.
Four weeks into the crisis there are 80 cases diagnosed. Twenty-four have died, among them a doctor and a nurse. There are fistfights outside of emergency rooms.
Hospitals have become a living hell.
Two and a half months after the initial attack, there are 15,000 smallpox victims - 4,500 are dead, and the survivors are blinded or scarred for life. Successive waves of infection could claim hundreds of thousands of victims.
That is the scenario of a bio-terrorist attack. It's just a fiction - just a training exercise. But D.A. Henderson says it's precisely what he fears could actually happen.
Now, these are not the musings of some ivory tower academic. D.A. Henderson is a 62-year-old doctor whose office walls at Johns Hopkins University are adorned by commendations from Ronald Reagan, Indira Ghandi, the United Nations and the World Health Organization. D.A. Henderson probably knows more about smallpox than anyone in the world. He's the one who eradicated it in the first place - back when smallpox was known as the worst pestilence in history.
Not too bad indeed. It was in fact a quiet, unsung, heroic and utterly amazing effort. Henderson was in charge of the World Health Organization's program to eradicate smallpox. His plan was to vaccinate 80% of the people in countries with smallpox. The virus only lives in humans, so if you isolate the cases, and create a barrier of vaccinated people around them, you can actually kill the bug forever. Initially the Henderson's program went well in Latin America and Africa. The big problem was India … too many people travelling around too much.
Dr. Henderson went on to write a book about the smallpox eradication campaign, and then investigated other infectious diseases like polio. Smallpox, he thought, was safety locked away in just two secure repositories - one in the United States - one in the Soviet Union. And both nations had promised not to develop biological weapons. But the Soviet Union was lying.
CLIP: (Henderson) "We learned in the mid-90s that the Russians had developed a very extensive program, for biological weapons - a huge operation to "weaponize" smallpox, to make it in a form to be used on a ballistic missile."
And that jolted D.A. Henderson back into public life - as the director the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense.
And so smallpox has gone from terrible plague to vanquished disease to a weapon of mass destruction. It is one of the tragic ironies in the history of biological warfare. But not the only one. Today, the nations most frightened about the possibility of biological weapons are those who originally let the genie out of the bottle.
A relic from the history of biological warfare can been found in the middle of some old industrial buildings on an Army base in Frederick, Maryland, just an hour north of Washington. The relic is called the 8-ball, a four story ball of steel now rusting at its joints. A plaque proclaims that it is a national historic monument. It doesn't say why. But if you look up at the equator of the 8-ball you see portholes for looking into the dark sphere - and doors some big enough to walk through.
They were experiments that made the 8-ball a very busy place about fifty years ago. The Army wanted to know how enemy troops might be affected by anthrax, plague, Q Fever, meningitis, encephalitis, and cholera. Thousands of mice, rabbits, sheep, mules, monkeys, and chimpanzees were sacrificed. Army soldiers could also volunteer to place their faces in a mask on one of the portholes and breathe in the pathogens inside the sphere. The volunteers would then be isolated, observed and, if necessary, brought back from death by a flood of antibiotics. The US Army says no humans are known to have died from 8-ball experiments. What they were trying to do at the 8-ball was turn nature into a weapon.
Leonard Cole is a political scientist at Rutgers University who has written two books on the history of biological warfare. Throughout history, he explains, germs have always killed people more than all the fighting with weapons.
The science of biological warfare took off in the Second World War. The allies suspected Japan and Germany of developing bio-weapons. So they launched their own programs. According to John Bryden, a Liberal M.P. and the author of a book called Deadly Allies, Canada was at the forefront.
During the occupation of Manchuria, the Japanese sprayed bacteria and viruses on enemy troops. Prisoners of war were exposed, then killed, then dissected like laboratory animals.
Historian Leonard Cole says that after the war the Japanese practitioners of biological warfare should have been prosecuted. But Washington was more interested in finding out what the Japanese had learned. And they did it at a sinful price.
What we do know is that after the war, the U.S. stepped up its work on biological weapons. And Canada continued to cooperate - with the use of a little patch of prairie near Suffield, Alberta.
There were also secret tests on unsuspecting human populations. For these tests, the US Army used chemicals and bacteria that it then considered "safe" - though we now know some of them were carcinogenic. But back in the fifties they used these chemical or bacteria in more than 200 releases --in New York subway tunnels, along the California Coastline and from the rooftops of major cities. Including one in Canada - chosen, without its knowledge, because it resembled cities in the Soviet Union. It was Winnipeg.
When he looks aback at it all, historian Leonard Cole is appalled by the disregard of civilian populations.
Biological weapons testing continued and by the end of the 1960s the Pentagon had proven that it could make biological weapons, and they worked.
Then, in 1969, a surprise announcement by US president Richard Nixon.
It's impossible to say why Nixon unilaterally renounced the use of biological weapons. Maybe he took the highroad, recognizing the repugnant nature of these weapons and wanting to abolish them forever. Maybe he feared the proliferation of bio-weapons. Even small nations could develop them. They'd be a poor man's nuclear bomb, and they'd take away the advantage of the nuclear superpowers. Better to outlaw them and maintain the existing balance of terror.
For its part, the then Soviet Union applauded Nixon's initiative. They made a big show of signing the Biological Weapons Treaty of 1973. But, secretly, Moscow launched the biggest biological weapons program in history.
The reappearance of smallpox as a weapon is what most startled the Americans when Ken Alibek defected to the west in 1992. The man who helped eradicate smallpox, Dr. D.A. Henderson, was especially concerned. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, former biological weapons scientists had begun to leave the country, with all of their knowledge, and perhaps with a few samples.
At Fort Detrick, Maryland, the US Army's biological weapons production factories, and the 8-ball testing sphere, have been decommissioned. The focus now is on defense against Biological weapons … and the heart of that research is in Fort Detrick's level 4 labs. A secure building with long, quiet hallways and heavy doors and the occasional sign saying NO PHOTOS.
These are the labs that inspired movies like Outbreak. Colonel Ted Cieslak often brings people here to look through the thick windows to see scientists in space suits and air hoses scientists working with deadly bugs like anthrax and Ebola fever.
Emergency defence planners in both the US and Canada are aware of the shortcomings of some of their preparations. And one of the big concerns is not an attack against humans, but against plant life and livestock. You can imagine the chaos and expense of such an attack if you think of the foot-and-mouth outbreak happening right now - it makes it easy to understand the impact of biological weapons against a nation's food supply.
George Lazarovitz is a phytopathologist (a plant doctor). He works with Agriculture Canada in London, Ontario, and he recently put on a seminar for his colleagues on how to recognize bio-terrorism against plants and animals.
Similar kinds of training sessions have been held for North American doctors and public health officials and ambulance operators and fire departments. It has become, in fact, quite a growth industry. It's estimated the US spends $2 billion a year on efforts to prepare for a bio-terrorist attack.
But is it necessary? Just how great is the real risk of a biological attack? There are differing views on that. One view is that biological weapons can be easily whipped up by a biology graduate in a kitchen sink and delivered with equipment bought on the Internet. That's the view of Michael Osterholm who wrote a book sub-titled, "What America needs to know to survive the coming Bioterrorist catastrophe." Michael Osterholm's vision is a scenario of doom.
Milt Leitenberg is on the other side of the debate. Leitenberg is an arms control specialist with the Federation of American Scientists. He contends that the debate about the biological weapons threat is filled with too much hype and drive by too much self-interest.
A lot of the debate about how scared we should be of bio-weapons, revolves around this incident. In 1995 a fanatic cult in Japan killed 19 people in several senseless attacks. They used chemical weapons. That was because they tried biological weapons and they didn't work.
Now, some analysts conclude that this proves it's very hard for small groups, even with a lot of money, to mount a bio-weapons threat. But others, like Colonel Ted Cieslak of the U.S. Army, argue that the threat may be small, but the consequences are enormous.
Back in Ottawa, it's business as usual at the Dept of Citizenship and Immigration. Police are still investigating who was behind the January hoax.
Meanwhile, Ottawa is reviewing an old smallpox containment plan that it once thought it could file in the archives. Now, consideration is being given to how much smallpox vaccine Canada may need - and where and if we can get our hands on it. Behind the scenes, there's a lot of federal-provincial emergency planning, and more scenario exercises and training programs to help doctors and nurses and phytopathologists and veterinarians recognize a biological attack if it happens.
Dr. D.A. Henderson says some of these measures will help the public health system respond to other things - like new emerging diseases. That's the up side of getting ready for bio-warfare. Still, Henderson never would have dreamed when he eradicated smallpox that he'd now be back fighting it once again.
Links:
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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