U.S. unprepared for disease outbreak - Bioterrorism

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), June, 2003

More than 140,000,000 people fly into the U.S. from overseas every year. Most flights take fewer than 24 hours--far less than the 12-day incubation period for smallpox. The upshot? A contagious disease outbreak overseas--such as SARS--whether natural or due to bioterrorism, could spread to America long before an epidemic is recognized.

Christopher Chyba, associate professor of geological and environmental sciences and codirector of the Stanford (Calif.) Center for International Security and Cooperation, stresses the need for biological security and how it differs from nuclear security. He argues that early detection and containment of a biological attack is the most-effective response to this growing threat. "Not only is there a moral argument for improving international disease surveillance and response, there is a pure national interest argument. We want to detect outbreaks as quickly as possible and shut them down. There's a huge impact in terms of reduction of casualties and economic harm if you can recognize it's happening quickly and therefore can respond quickly."

Unlike the production of nuclear weapons, which still greatly depend on large, expensive facilities, biological weapons can be made in a variety of settings that could be harder to detect and monitor because they can be designed for more than one purpose. Established strategies used to combat the spread of nuclear weapons--nonproliferation and deterrence--are less effective in stopping the spread of biological weapons. Unlike nuclear weapons that require highly enriched uranium or weapons-grade plutonium--substances that are complicated and expensive to manufacture--biological agents can be obtained from natural disease outbreaks or even from laboratories. Furthermore, a strategy of deterrence is unlikely to be effective in a biological or chemical terrorist attack. For example, it is still unknown who carried out the deadly anthrax attacks in October, 2001.

Chyba says theoretical war games show how a deadly epidemic could unfold in this country. However, real cases are scary enough. In 1972, it took four weeks before health officials in the former Yugoslavia realized they were dealing with a smallpox epidemic, caused by a single person returning from Mecca in Saudi Arabia. In response, the country's leader, Josip Broz Tito, vaccinated his entire population and quarantined about 10,000 people in commandeered hotels and apartment complexes surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers. The draconian measures worked since the smallpox epidemic was contained after nine weeks, but not before 175 people contracted the disease and 35 died.

Despite the potential danger it poses, Chyba claims the biotechnology explosion is essentially unstoppable. "Broadly speaking, much of the applicable technology--whether interested in genetically engineered crops or genetically engineered microbes--is similar. We're faced with a world where it becomes increasingly easy for small groups of people to produce pathogens that are extremely deadly."

Experts do not know how to respond to this. "The models we have from the Cold War--bilateral arms control models or multilateral nonproliferation models--are not good models for this new threat."