IP: "Bioarmageddon"

["Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>]

From: believer@telepath.com
Subject: IP: "Bioarmageddon"
Date: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 06:56:14 -0500
To: believer@telepath.com

Source:  New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/bioterrorism/bioarmageddon.html

Bioterrorism Special Report: 

Bioarmageddon 
By Debora MacKenzie 

Sooner or later there is going to be a biological attack on a major city.
Are we prepared to deal with it? Not a chance, says Debora MacKenzie 

It begins with a threat. A terrorist group declares that unless its demands
are met within 48 hours, it will release anthrax over San Francisco. Two
days later, a private plane flies across the Bay, spreading an aerosol
cloud that shimmers briefly in the sunlight before disappearing. 

Scenario one: thousands are killed in the panic as 2 million people flee
the city. Another 1�6 million inhale anthrax spores. Antibiotics are rushed
in, but the hospitals are overwhelmed and not everyone receives
treatment. Most of the country's limited stock of anthrax vaccine has
already been given to soldiers.
Emergency crews provide little help as there are only four germ-proof suits
in the whole city. More than a
million of the Bay Area's 6.5 million residents die.  

Scenario two: in the two days before the attack, citizens seal their doors
and windows with germ-proof tape. They listen to the radio for
instructions, their gas masks, drugs and disinfectants ready. Few panic.
When sensors around the city confirm that the cloud contains anthrax
spores, hospitals receive the appropriate antibiotics and vaccines. Trained
emergency teams with germ-proof suits and tents set up in the places where
automated weather analyses show the deadly cloud will drift. With advance
preparation and rapid response only 100,000 people die. 

A terrorist who plans to drop anthrax over San Francisco tomorrow can count
on causing the murder and mayhem described in the first scenario--at least
according to the simulation that generated these scenarios last year. The
question facing policy makers now is: how do we move toward the second
scenario? 

That terrorists may someday turn to biological weapons is no longer a
matter of debate (see "All fall down",
New Scientist, 11 May 1996, p 32). "Terrorism has changed," says Brad
Roberts of the US government-backed Institute for Defense Analyses in
Virginia. "Traditional terrorists wanted political concessions," he says.
"But now, some groups say their main aim is mass casualties. That makes
biological weapons appealing." 

Terrorists would have little trouble getting their hands on the technology.
Hearings in South Africa in June
revealed that the apartheid government produced terrorist weapons
containing anthrax, Salmonella and cholera. Soviet scientists who have
prepared weapons-grade anthrax and smallpox are known to have emigrated,
possibly to well-funded terrorist groups like the one run by Osama bin
Laden in Afghanistan.
Even small groups such as the Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan have been able to
cook up vats of Salmonella or
botulin, the toxin that causes botulism.  

With bioweapons so readily available, how can governments protect us from a
terrorist armed with anthrax, smallpox or plague? In May, scientists,
policy makers and security experts gathered in Stockholm to discuss how to
limit the devastation of a biological attack on civilians. Until now, most
biological defence strategies have been geared to protecting soldiers on
the battlefield rather than ordinary people in cities. The situations are
quite different, and novel technologies are needed for civilian defence. 

Suppose a commuter stumbled across a time bomb filled with anthrax on an
underground railway platform.
Until this year, no police force in the world had any way to disarm such a
device safely. One novel solution that attracted attention at Stockholm was
a tent full of antiseptic foam. Researchers at Irvin Aerospace in Fort
Erie, Ontario, have developed a dome-shaped tent made of ultratough Mylar
that can be filled with a stiff foam--the exact composition of which is a
closely guarded secret--that kills germs and also neutralises chemical
weapons. Once covered by the foam-filled tent, the bomb can be safely
detonated. 

But what if germs are already in the air? The protective suits and masks
used by most emergency services don't have seals tight enough to exclude
microorganisms, making them useless against biological attacks, says Jack
Sawicki, a former fireman who now works for Geomet Technologies near
Washington DC. And the
lack of standards for gas masks sold to civilians in most countries makes
it as likely that a mask will suffocate
you as save you, he says. The suits developed for the military do
work--their tight joints and zippers keep
bugs out--but they are too pricey for the average fire department. 

Both Geomet and Irvin Aerospace are about to market civilian bio-suits. In
the meantime, other companies are
designing protective gear that actually kills pathogens. Molecular
Geodesics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for
example, is developing a suit made of a tough, sponge-like polymer that
traps bacteria and viruses, which are then destroyed by disinfectants
incorporated into the fabric. 

Stealthy attack 

None of this gear will do any good, however, if the emergency services do
not know there has been an
attack. And an assault may not be obvious. A terrorist might not use a
weapon that goes off with a dramatic
bang, or even produces an obvious cloud of germs. The first hint of a
biological attack may be a sudden
cluster of sick people.  

Even that will be missed unless someone is watching. And few are. In the
US, financial cutbacks have
crippled programmes to track disease outbreaks, natural or deliberate. Some
could be either, such as
food poisoning caused by Escherichia coli O157 or Salmonella. Medical
agencies fear that the extra money
requested by President Bill Clinton this spring as part of an
anti-terrorist initiative will not be enough to create
an adequate surveillance network.  

In Europe, disease surveillance is only beginning to be organised on the
continent-wide scale needed to track a biological emergency. But in
addition to monitoring infected people, Nicholas Staritsyn of the State
Research Centre for Applied Microbiology near Moscow says that more effort
should be made to find
out which bugs live where. For example, a particular variety of anthrax may
occur naturally in South Africa,
but not in Canada. Having access to such information could help authorities
to distinguish between natural
outbreaks and deliberate attacks.  

Even when infected people start turning up at local hospitals, early
diagnosis of their illness might not be
easy, says Steve Morse, who heads the US programme on new diagnostic
technologies run by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The first symptoms of anthrax,
plague and many other
potential agents of bioterrorism resemble those of flu: headaches, fevers,
aching muscles, coughing. What's
more, some of these symptoms might be brought on by panic attacks, which
are likely to be widespread among people who have just been told that they
are the victims of a biological attack. 

One answer discussed in Stockholm would be for hospitals to have the type
of high-tech detectors being
developed to identify airborne pathogens on the battlefield. With a
detector at each bedside, doctors could pick out the volatile molecules
released by damaged lung membranes at a very early stage of infection and
instantly tell whether a patient was a victim of a biological attack, says
Mildred Donlon, head of environmental detection research at DARPA. 

Eventually, DARPA would like to develop a detector that weighs no more than
2 kilograms, can identify as few as two particles of 20 different
biological agents in a sample of air, costs less than $5000 and does not
give false negatives. Such detectors could be deployed around cities to
give early warning of airborne disease. 

In the meantime, researchers led by Wayne Bryden at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore are working on revamping the traditional laboratory
workhorse, the mass spectrometer, for use in the field or in hospitals.
They've reduced this unwieldy piece of equipment to a suitcase-sized
machine that can distinguish between,
say, Shigella, which causes dysentery, and Salmonella. A shoebox-sized
version, says Bryden, could be ready in five years. 

Other researchers are experimenting with devices that would not seem out of
place in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Tiny electronic chips that
contain living nerve cells may someday warn of the presence of bacterial
toxins, many of which are nerve poisons. Like a canary in a coal mine, the
neurons on the chip will chatter until something kills them. "Anything that
stops it singing is immediate cause for alarm," says Donlon. 

While the "canary on a chip" could detect a broad range of toxins, other
devices are designed to identify specific pathogens. One prototype consists
of a fibre-optic tube lined with antibodies coupled to light-emitting
molecules. In the presence of plague or anthrax bacteria, or the toxins
botulin or ricin, the molecules light up. 

Outwitting our defences 

Devices based on antibodies are far from foolproof. First, you need to have
the correct antibodies--not easy when you consider the vast number of
pathogens you'd need to include, and their ever-changing repertoire of
surface proteins. "And even the right antibodies can identify only what is
on the outside of a particle," Donlon points out. Bugs can be encapsulated
in gels or biological polymers to foil antibodies, or normally harmless
bacteria engineered to carry nasty genes. "I want to know what is on the
inside," she says. 

To do this, DARPA-funded researchers are developing identification
techniques based on RNA analysis. Unlike DNA, which is now used to identify
unknown organisms, RNA is plentiful inside cells and need not be amplified
before identification begins. And messenger RNA molecules reveal not only
what a microorganism
is, but what toxins it is making.   

Once the biological agent has been identified, how do you combat it?
Vaccinating people before they are exposed is one answer. This is the
strategy the military is betting on. Last year, the US military launched a
programme to develop vaccines against potential biological weapons. It will
create jabs for diseases for which none exist, such as Ebola, and improve
existing vaccines--including the 30-year-old anthrax vaccine being given to
2�4 million American soldiers. 

But vaccines are no cure-all. An attacker need only generate a germ that
sports different antigens to those used in a vaccine to render that vaccine
ineffective. Plus, as bioterrorists get more sophisticated, they will
develop novel, possibly artificial, pathogens against which conventional
vaccines will be useless, predicts Morse. 

To get around these problems, DARPA is looking at ways of developing
vaccines quickly enough for them to be created, mass-produced and
distributed after an attack. The first step, which many researchers
including those in the fast-paced field of genomics are now working on,
involves speeding up DNA sequencing so that an unknown pathogen's genes
could be detailed in a day. The resulting sequences could then be the basis
for developing an instant DNA vaccine. 

Making the vaccine is only half the problem, however. Soldiers can be
ordered to take shots, but immunising 
the rest of the population is another matter. Civilians are unlikely to
volunteer for the dozens of vaccinations that would be necessary to protect
them against every conceivable biological threat. An attack would make many
change their minds, but in such circumstances there might not be enough to
go around. Although Clinton has called for the stockpiling of vaccines, the
US has only 5 million doses of smallpox vaccine--not enough to contain a
hypothetical attack, says Ken Berry, president of the American Academy of
Emergency Physicians. 

Ken Alibek, the former second-in-command of the Soviet germ warfare
programme who revealed earlier this year that the Soviets had weaponised
tonnes of smallpox, argues that it is short-sighted to put too much effort
into developing vaccines. Instead, says Alibek, who is now at the Batelle
Institute in Virginia, researchers should concentrate on ways to treat
victims of biological weapons. Today's antibiotics may be useless because
germs could be equipped with genes for resistance to all of them. Russian
scientists have already created such a strain of anthrax (This Week, 28
February, p 4). 

For any treatment to be effective amid the potential chaos of a
bioterrorist attack, speed will be of the essence. At the Stockholm
meeting, researchers reported their efforts to develop drugs that work
against a wide variety of infections and so can be used even before
definitive diagnosis. Some are trying to take advantage of recently
identified similarities in the way many pathogens produce disease to
develop broad-spectrum drugs. 

For example, Ebola, anthrax and plague all kill their victims by inducing a
widespread inflammatory reaction similar to toxic shock syndrome. A team in
Cincinnati is testing an anti-inflammatory drug that could stop all of
them. Another gang of bacteria--including plague, Salmonella, Shigella and
Pseudomonas aeruginosa (one of the bacteria that can cause pneumonia and
meningitis)--relies on very similar proteins to latch onto human cells and
inject toxins. Drugs that block this system might save people from all
these germs, �ke Forsberg of the Swedish Defence Research Establishment in
Ume� told the meeting.  

The trouble with all these new anti-bioweapon gizmos, gadgets and medicines
is that it's far from certain that 
they would be available in time to shield the first major city targeted for
a bioterrorist attack. At the moment, the US is one of the few countries
taking the bioterrorist threat seriously. Sweden, France and Israel have
trained emergency teams and stockpiled gas masks. Other countries do not
seem concerned. "The threat of bioterrorism has not seized our European
friends," says Mike Moodie of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control
Institute, a think-tank near Washington DC. "They feel it's too improbable." 

Perhaps they should reconsider. Berry, who helped run the doomsday
simulations that ravaged San  Francisco, says: "Security experts are not
asking if a biological attack on a civilian population is going to happen,
but when." 

>From New Scientist, 19 September 1998 
� Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 1998
-----------------------
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
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