[Vision2020] Know your bioterrorist enemy New Scientist

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Editorial: Know your bioterrorist enemy
  a.. 07 October 2006 
  b.. NewScientist.com news service 

FIVE years ago this week Bob Stevens, a picture editor in Florida, died after opening a letter laced with dried anthrax spores. There were six more envelopes, four more deaths and 17 further infections from which some people have never fully recovered. Yet despite the massive investigation that the FBI insists is ongoing, the anthrax attacker is still at large. The agency has not even named a suspect. There has been one significant outcome of the attacks, though: a massive investment in biodefence by the US government - $44 billion since 2001 (see Fortress America).

Fear of bioterrorism had been growing in the US well before the anthrax attacks, fuelled partly by post-cold war insecurity over who America's enemies were and partly by revelations about the size of the bioweapons arsenal built up by the Soviet Union. Many think the attacker was a US biodefence scientist who, after 9/11, wanted to push the government into taking more action. Whoever it was, that was certainly the effect. Yet since then there has not been a single bioterrorist attack anywhere in the world. Given that the actual risk of such an attack remains unclear, and that experts believe terrorists are far more likely to use conventional explosives because they are easier to handle, has the US reaction been inappropriate?

Perhaps. There is always a chance that someone will try, and a low risk does not mean we should do nothing. But consider this: we are at far greater risk from natural diseases. Since 2001 the world has twice been threatened by a major natural pandemic. The first was the SARS outbreak in 2003. Had it not been for uncommonly resolute action from the World Health Organization - and some old-fashioned luck - the virus would have got out of control and would still be killing people across the world. Of course, the threat of an H5N1 bird flu pandemic is still very much with us. The virus hasn't learned to spread readily in humans yet, but the chance of it doing so is at least as great as that of Al-Qaida posting us all anthrax spores.

We are faced with two bio-enemies: one real, one largely imagined but impossible to dismiss. What the Bush administration appears not to have grasped is that we can kill both with one stone. Many pathogens have common points of weakness; it might be possible to attack several with the same drug. Moreover, our immune reactions to many diseases are similar even when the attacking bugs are not. As our knowledge of both areas expands, we can expect better prevention and treatment for all manner of infections. With serious funding, this could lead to wide-ranging defences against many of the infections nature or humans can throw at us.

This is a far better strategy than that taken by biodefence tsars in the US, who are throwing all the money at the threat that seems least likely to materialise.

>From issue 2572 of New Scientist magazine, 07 October 2006, page 5
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